world, and thrice a week to friends. Maltravers
was soon of the latter class. Madame de Ventadour had been in England
in her childhood, for her parents had been _emigres_. She spoke English
well and fluently, and this pleased Maltravers; for though the French
language was sufficiently familiar to him, he was like most who are more
vain of the mind than the person, and proudly averse to hazarding his
best thoughts in the domino of a foreign language. We don't care
how faulty the accent, or how incorrect the idiom, in which we talk
nothings; but if we utter any of the poetry within us, we shudder at the
risk of the most trifling solecism.

This was especially the case with Maltravers; for, besides being now
somewhat ripened from his careless boyhood into a proud and fastidious
man, he had a natural love for the Becoming. This love was unconsciously
visible in trifles: it is the natural parent of Good Taste. And it was
indeed an inborn good taste which redeemed Ernest's natural carelessness
in those personal matters in which young men usually take a pride. An
habitual and soldier-like neatness, and a love of order and symmetry,
stood with him in the stead of elaborate attention to equipage and
dress.

Maltravers had not thought twice in his life whether he was handsome or
not; and, like most men who have a knowledge of the gentler sex, he knew
that beauty had little to do with engaging the love of women. The air,
the manner, the tone, the conversation, the something that interests,
and the something to be proud of--these are the attributes of the man
made to be loved. And the Beauty-man is, nine times out of ten, little
more than the oracle of his aunts, and the "_Sich_ a love!" of the
housemaids!

To return from this digression, Maltravers was glad that he could talk
in his own language to Madame de Ventadour; and the conversation between
them generally began in French, and glided away into English. Madame
de Ventadour was eloquent, and so was Maltravers; yet a more complete
contrast in their mental views and conversational peculiarities can
scarcely be conceived. Madame de Ventadour viewed everything as a woman
of the world: she was brilliant, thoughtful, and not without delicacy
and tenderness of sentiment; still all was cast in a worldly mould. She
had been formed by the influences of society, and her mind betrayed its
education. At once witty and melancholy (no uncommon union), she was a
disciple of the sad but ca