own law and
a great passion its own channel. There was moreover an irresponsible
indescribable effect of beauty in everything his lips uttered. Free
alike from adulation and from envy, the essence of his discourse was a
divine apprehension, a romantic vision free as the flight of Ariel, of
the poetry of his companions' situation and their contrasted general
irresponsiveness.

"How does the look of age come?" he suddenly broke out at dessert. "Does
it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded, unmeasured? Or do you woo it
and set baits and traps for it, and watch it like the dawning brownness
of a meerschaum pipe, and make it fast, when it appears, just where it
peeps out, and light a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to it
daily? Or do you forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it
settling and deepening about you as irresistible as fate?"

"What the deuce is the man talking about?" said the smile of our host.

"I found a little grey hair this morning," Miss Searle incoherently
prosed.

"Well then I hope you paid it every respect!" cried her visitor.

"I looked at it for a long time in my hand-glass," she answered with
more presence of mind.

"Miss Searle can for many years to come afford to be amused at grey
hairs," I interposed in the hope of some greater ease. It had its
effect. "Ten years from last Thursday I shall be forty-four," she almost
comfortably smiled.

"Well, that's just what I am," said Searle. "If I had only come here ten
years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the feast, but I should
have had less appetite. I needed first to get famished."

"Oh why did you wait for that?" his entertainer asked. "To think of
these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!" At the vision of
which waste and loss Mr. Searle had a fine shrill laugh.

"Well," my friend explained, "I always had a notion--a stupid vulgar
notion if there ever was one--that to come abroad properly one had to
have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At last I came with my
empty pot!"

Mr. Searle had a wait for delicacy, but he proceeded. "You're reduced,
you're--a--straitened?"

Our companion's very breath blew away the veil. "Reduced to nothing.
Straitened to the clothes on my back!"

"You don't say so!" said Mr. Searle with a large vague gasp.
"Well--well--well!" he added in a voice which might have meant
everything or nothing; and then, in his whimsical way, went on to finish
a glass of wine