is hardest to
please, however he may be hardest to satisfy, with the attempt to
follow her. The accomplished poet will derive pleasure from verses
which are a mockery to the soul of the unhappy mortal whose business
is judgment--the most thankless of all labours, and justly so.
Certain fruits one is unable to like until he has eaten them in
their perfection; after that, the reminder in them of the perfect
will enable him to enjoy even the inferior a little, recognizing
their kind--always provided he be not one given to judgment--a
connoisseur, that is, one who cares less for the truth than for the
knowing comparison of one embodiment of it with another. Gibbie's
regard then, as it wandered round the room, lighting on this colour,
and that texture, in curtain, or carpet, or worked screen, found
interest and pleasure. Amidst the mere upholstery of houses and
hearts, amidst the common life of the common crowd, he was, and had
to be, what he had learned to be amongst the nobility and in the
palace of Glashgar.

Mrs. Sclater, late Mrs. Bonniman, was the widow of a merchant who
had made his money in foreign trade, and to her house Mr. Sclater
had flitted when he married her. She was a well-bred woman, much
the superior of her second husband in the small duties and graces of
social life, and, already a sufferer in some of his not very serious
_grossieretes_, regarded with no small apprehension the arrival of one
in whom she expected the same kind of thing in largely exaggerated
degree. She did not much care to play the mother to a bear cub, she
said to her friends, with a good-humoured laugh. "Just think," she
added, "with such a childhood as the poor boy had, what a mass of
vulgarity must be lying in that uncultivated brain of his! It is no
small mercy, as Mr. Sclater says, that our ears at least are safe.
Poor boy!"--She was a woman of about forty, rather tall, of good
complexion tending to the ruddy, with black smooth shining hair
parted over a white forehead, black eyes, nose a little aquiline,
good mouth, and fine white teeth--altogether a handsome woman--some
notion of whose style may be gathered from the fact that, upon the
testimony of her cheval glass, she preferred satin to the richest of
silks, and almost always wore it. Now and then she would attempt a
change, but was always defeated and driven back into satin. She was
precise in her personal rules, but not stiff in the manners wherein
she embodied them