hat I have in my eye is a very caustic
speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in absolute command,
whether for silence or attack. If she chance to dislike you, you will
be tempted to curse the malignity of age. But if you chance to please
even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laughing
grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play,
with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as
well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections
among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is disguised in sugar of
wit; it is administered as a compliment--if you had not pleased, you
would not have been censured; it is a personal affair--a hyphen, _a
trait d'union,_[45] between you and your censor; age's philandering,
for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young man feels very
much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio,[46] sick with
self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The
correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have
transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a
man were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment.
But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any
good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism,
every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile,
and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction,
and ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a
repetition of the discipline.

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps
toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing
with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some--and I doubt if
there be any man who can return the compliment.

The class of men represented by Vernon Whitford in _The Egoist_,[47]
says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a
noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast
to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but
we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully
considers "its astonishing dryness." He is the best of men, but the
best of women manage to combine all that and something more. Their
very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of
their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the
proprieties. They can touch a sub