The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope

Mr. John Eames, of the Income-tax Office, had in these days risen so high in the world that people in the west-end of town, and very respectable people too -- people living in South Kensington, in neighbourhoods not far from Belgravia, and in very handsome houses round Bayswater -- were glad to ask him out to dinner. Money had been left to him by an earl, and rumour had of course magnified that money. He was a private secretary, which is in itself a great advance on being a mere clerk. And he had become the particularly intimate friend of an artist who had pushed himself into high fashion during the last year or two -- one Conway Dalrymple, whom the rich English world was beginning to pet and pelt with gilt sugarplums, and who seemed to take very kindly to petting and gilt sugarplums.

I don't know whether the friendship of Conway Dalrymple had not done as much to secure John Eames his position at the Bayswater dinner-tables, as had either the private secretaryship, or the earl's money; and yet, when they had first known each other, now only two or three years ago, Conway Dalrymple had been the poorer man of the two. Some chance had brought them together, and they had lived in the same rooms for nearly two years. This arrangement had been broken up, and the Conway Dalrymple of these days had a studio of his own, somewhere near Kensington Palace, where he painted portraits of young countesses, and in which he had even painted a young duchess. It was the peculiar merit of his pictures -- so at least said the art-loving world -- that though the likeness was always good, the stiffness of the modern portrait was never there. There was also ever some story told in Dalrymple's pictures over and above the story of the portraiture.