et half exasperated, and he
asked himself all kinds of questions. Did she not lie, after all, when
she let his falsehoods pass without a protest? Was not her life a
perpetual complicity, and did she not aid and abet him by the simple
fact that she was not disgusted with him? Then again perhaps she _was_
disgusted and it was the mere desperation of her pride that had given
her an inscrutable mask. Perhaps she protested in private, passionately;
perhaps every night, in their own apartments, after the day's hideous
performance, she made him the most scorching scene. But if such scenes
were of no avail and he took no more trouble to cure himself, how could
she regard him, and after so many years of marriage too, with the
perfectly artless complacency that Lyon had surprised in her in the
course of the first day's dinner? If our friend had not been in love
with her he could have taken the diverting view of the Colonel's
delinquencies; but as it was they turned to the tragical in his mind,
even while he had a sense that his solicitude might also have been
laughed at.

The observation of these three days showed him that if Capadose was an
abundant he was not a malignant liar and that his fine faculty exercised
itself mainly on subjects of small direct importance. 'He is the liar
platonic,' he said to himself; 'he is disinterested, he doesn't operate
with a hope of gain or with a desire to injure. It is art for art and he
is prompted by the love of beauty. He has an inner vision of what might
have been, of what ought to be, and he helps on the good cause by the
simple substitution of a _nuance_. He paints, as it were, and so do I!'
His manifestations had a considerable variety, but a family likeness ran
through them, which consisted mainly of their singular futility. It was
this that made them offensive; they encumbered the field of
conversation, took up valuable space, converted it into a sort of
brilliant sun-shot fog. For a fib told under pressure a convenient place
can usually be found, as for a person who presents himself with an
author's order at the first night of a play. But the supererogatory lie
is the gentleman without a voucher or a ticket who accommodates himself
with a stool in the passage.

In one particular Lyon acquitted his successful rival; it had puzzled
him that irrepressible as he was he had not got into a mess in the
service. But he perceived that he respected the service--that august
institution was sa