The Principal Girl

The great Proconsul stood on one of Messrs. Maple’s best hearthrugs in Grosvenor Square. A typical payer of the super-tax, a pink and prosperous gentleman in a morning coat and striped trousers, his appearance had long commanded the admiration of his country.

He had not ruled the teeming millions of the Ganges, although the strength of his digestion and his absence of imagination would at any time have enabled him to do so. But for a period of nine weeks he had been the Resident of Barataria North-West; and partly for that reason and partly for a reason even more cogent, he had the distinction of being the last peer created by Mr. Vandeleur’s last government.

The world is familiar with Sir William Richmond’s fine portrait of Walter Augustus, first Baron Shelmerdine of Potterhanworth now, on loan at the National Portrait Gallery. In this the national asset appears as he encountered his Sovereign in knee breeches, silk stockings, shoe buckles and other regalia.

Competent judges consider it an excellent likeness, and of course quite unexceptionable as a work of art. It is the portrait of a happily endowed Englishman in his manly prime, to which the nation at large is able to refer between the hours of ten and four, Fridays excepted.

Eton, Balliol, diplomacy, private means, together with various places of emolument under the Crown, had each a share in raising Shelmerdine of Potterhanworth to his elevation. A first baron certainly, but not a mushroom growth. The honors of a grateful nation had come to him mainly because he had not been able to avoid them. From early youth he had been ranged with those who always do the right thing at the right time in the right way. He had always hit the bull’s-eye so exactly in the centre that public regard had had to strive to keep pace with his progress.

Up till the age of one-and-thirty, Shelmerdine—not then of Potterhanworth—had like humbler mortals just a sporting chance of getting off the target. But at the age of thirty-one he married. By that judicious action he forfeited any little chance he may have had of dying an obscure, private individual.

Sociologists differ as to what is the most portentous phenomenon of the age in which we dwell, but there is a body of the well-informed which awards the palm unhesitatingly to that amiable institution, the Suffolk Colthurst.

The world is under great obligations to this interesting representative of the higher mammalia. The upper reaches of Theology are whitened with the bones of the Suffolk Colthurst. It makes an almost ideal Under-Secretary, it is always so smooth-spoken and well-brushed; it makes a most excellent Judge; there is no place of emolument it is not fitted to grace; and in the unlikely event of a doubt invading your mind as to whether the particular schoolmaster will be inducted to the vacant see of Wincanton, you have only to look up which branch it was of the Suffolk Colthursts into which he married, and at what period of his life he married her.

What would be the Established Order without the Colthurst of Suffolk? What would be the Navy and Army, Law and Medicine, Parliament itself, Art—and yes, gentlemen!—Letters, without the Colthurst of Suffolk?

It is an error, however, to suppose that this pleasant phenomenon confines itself to one little corner of the globe. The Colthurst is indigenous to Suffolk, but for generations there has been quite a colony settled in Kent. There is also the world-famous Scotch variety, and of late traces of the Suffolk Colthurst have been found in America. The Transatlantic mind, never slow at diagnosis, and with its trick of masterful and telling speech, has already ventured to define its creed. In America the creed of the Suffolk Colthurst has been defined as the Art of Getting There with Both Feet.

Please do not assume that there is anything ignoble about the Colthurst of Suffolk. Quite the contrary. It has been laid down as a general principle that the Suffolk Colthurst never makes money but always marries it. That is not to say, of course, that a Suffolk Colthurst has never been known to make money, because such a statement, however pleasant, would be in excess of the truth. But the Suffolk Colthurst, pur sang, sets less store by the making of money than by the spending of money in the way that shows it has always had money to spend.