a mediaeval knight his
armour. One had to approve. And there was no getting away from him. He
was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture
of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for him
at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a
corner of the Strand.

Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed with
Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on
self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to
Dudley's. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the
presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of
conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove him
to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be
bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley to
critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and
foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another thing,
she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a
tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she
seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having to
share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman's way, always
reassured by his endurance of Colney's company:--she read it to mean,
that he could bear Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor
had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve
his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young
Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to
Colney's acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter's antidote to
Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a
period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants to
be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not performance,
of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their temperaments.
Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the Nineteenth
Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced
from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to
vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and
the saturnine since t