{"product_id":"2940014874632","title":"A Millionaire's Cousin","description":"An excerpt from the beginning of:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER I.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMY ARRIVAL.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI,  ADOLPHUS BELL, am a painter, and the first of my family that has taken to the arts as a vocation. Like many artists whose means are more modest than their ambitions, I share a studio with others in the same predicament. Now the comfort of such an arrangement depends, it will be obvious, largely, if not entirely, upon the amount of equality and good fellowship which prevails between the several members of the party, any tendency to domination on the part of one being naturally fatal to such equality. At present our party consists of three, and two of us—Simcox and myself — are decidedly overridden and overmatched by the third, whose circumstances have given him a certain perfectly adventitious preponderance of which he is not slow to take advantage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrown Judkins is a big, red, burly-mannered young man, with about as much feeling for art, in my humble opinion, as an average coal-heaver. Having had the advantage, however, of a year's training in Paris and another at Brussels, he has a certain slap-dash way of producing his effects, knocking off so many yards as it were of paint and canvas—which to my feeling is little, if any thing, short of impertinent. Thanks also to this same early familiarity, he can dilate at large upon foreign capitals—their gayeties and galleries, the respective beauty of their women—subjects upon which neither Simcox nor myself can pretend to give an opinion, the former's acquaintanceship with the continent of Europe being limited to a fortnight spent in extreme youth upon the sands of Boulogne, while my own past history has not, unfortunately, been embellished by even so distant and meager an experience as this. Now, as no one naturally likes to be set at naught upon such purely frivolous and adventitious grounds as these, it has for a very long time back been a fixed idea in my mind that I would seize upon the very earliest opportunity which presented itself of shaking off this insular reproach, and putting myself upon a level with Brown Judkins in this respect. That being the case, my satisfaction may easily be imagined upon receiving one morning about the middle of last February a letter from my cousin, John Hargrave, inviting me to spend some weeks with him in his villa at Algiers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn Hargrave and myself may be said to stand at exactly opposite ends of the monetary scale, my fixed income being accurately represented by a naught, his by the same naught many times repeated, with a handsome figure at one end to give it weight and consistence. The Hargraves are all rich, whereas none of the Bells have ever, I regret to say, possessed a groat in their lives. The late Sir Benjamin Hargrave (he was knighted upon the occasion of some, I have forgotten what, civic function) was a full-blown, pompous-looking individual, with a massive gold chain and a bunch of dangling watch-seals, which the conformation of his person seemed always to bring into prominent relief. When I was a very little boy he had a way, I remember, of chucking me under the chin, and telling me to hold up my head and not be afraid, which even in those youthful days filled me with vague rage and confusion. The Hargraves' house was in Portman Square, and a very magnificent affair it was, with an amount of gold leaf upon its walls and its ceilings which otherwise distributed would have sufficed for a good many minor diadems. In those days wealth had not learned to disguise itself under quaint and strange devices, and my great-uncle Hargrave (he was my mother's uncle) certainly showed his in a sufficiently naïve and outspoken fashion. As I advanced to man's estate I used now and then to be bidden to entertainments, at which my lot generally was to stand in a doorway and watch the variegated throngs streaming beneath the many-twinkling candelabra. Poor relations have, however—perhaps unwarrantably—their own opinions, and it was no small consolation to me, I remember, to mentally smile at these redundant splendors, and turn up my nose (of course quite invisibly!) at what, to my youthful and fastidious mind, seemed the somewhat barbaric character of my great-uncle Hargrave's entertainments.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI speak in the past tense, for these glories have of late departed, or at all events been under temporary eclipse, since the death of their former and their reversion to their present proprietor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn Hargrave, my cousin, is a man of a totally different type from his father. He wears no gold chains, or if he does they are not obtrusively evident. Since his accession to the family accumulations the house in Portman Square has been shut up, he having no turn for the sort of aldermanic pomp for which its halls were formerly renowned. John is now forty-five, and has therefore been about the world for a pretty considerable time. He has never married...","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47147760746736,"sku":"2940014874632","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014874632_p0.jpg?v=1763616442","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014874632","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}