may feel they are.'

The general look then implied a false encouragement, and the man in
spectacles looked down again, being a nervous person, who never had time
to show his merits because he was so much occupied in hiding his faults.

'Do you know the authoress, Mr. Neigh?' continued Ladywell.

'Can't say that I do,' he replied.

Neigh was a man who never disturbed the flesh upon his face except when
he was obliged to do so, and paused ten seconds where other people only
paused one; as he moved his chin in speaking, motes of light from under
the candle-shade caught, lost, and caught again the outlying threads of
his burnished beard.

'She will be famous some day; and you ought at any rate to read her
book.'

'Yes, I ought, I know. In fact, some years ago I should have done it
immediately, because I had a reason for pushing on that way just then.'

'Ah, what was that?'

'Well, I thought of going in for Westminster Abbey myself at that time;
but a fellow has so much to do, and--'

'What a pity that you didn't follow it up. A man of your powers, Mr.
Neigh--'

'Afterwards I found I was too steady for it, and had too much of the
respectable householder in me. Besides, so many other men are on the
same tack; and then I didn't care about it, somehow.'

'I don't understand high art, and am utterly in the dark on what are the
true laws of criticism,' a plain married lady, who wore archaeological
jewellery, was saying at this time. 'But I know that I have derived an
unusual amount of amusement from those verses, and I am heartily thankful
to "E." for them.'

'I am afraid,' said a gentleman who was suffering from a bad shirt-front,
'that an estimate which depends upon feeling in that way is not to be
trusted as permanent opinion.'

The subject now flitted to the other end.

'Somebody has it that when the heart flies out before the understanding,
it saves the judgment a world of pains,' came from a voice in that
quarter.

'I, for my part, like something merry,' said an elderly woman, whose face
was bisected by the edge of a shadow, which toned her forehead and
eyelids to a livid neutral tint, and left her cheeks and mouth like metal
at a white heat in the uninterrupted light. 'I think the liveliness of
those ballads as great a recommendation as any. After all, enough misery
is known to us by our experiences and those of our friends, and what we
see in the newspapers, for all purposes of chastening, without