Gloria Victis! by Ossip Schubin

If Oswald Lodrin might be regarded as the chivalric embodiment of the old-time '_noblesse oblige_,' his cousin Georges was on the contrary the personification of the modern axiom '_noblesse permet_.'

He had made use of the credit of the Lodrins, the accumulation of centuries, to screen his maddest pranks. True, he had never overdrawn this credit, he had never by any of his numberless eccentricities raised any barrier between himself and his equals in rank. He had grown to manhood discontentedly convinced that Count Hugo Lodrin, his father's elder brother, had done him great wrong, and this wrong was his marriage late in life with the beautiful Princess Wjera Zinsenburg.