relation with you, and would show you, with the last subtlety of
displeasure, his impatience of your attempting anything more with
himself. With such an ideal of decent ease he would, confound you,
"sink" a hundred other attributes--or the recognition at least and the
formulation of them--that you might abjectly have taken for granted in
him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small
wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance
of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages,
flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective,
a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that
might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion,
you might infer--to cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any
opportunity, however convenient, for an unfair pull. Which habit it was
that must have produced in him a sort of ripe and radiant fairness; if
it be allowed us, that is, to figure in so shining an air a nobleman of
fifty-three, of an undecided rather than a certified frame or outline,
of a head thinly though neatly covered and not measureably massive, of
an almost trivial freshness, of a face marked but by a fine inwrought
line or two and lighted by a merely charming expression. You might
somehow have traced back the whole character so presented to an ideal
privately invoked--that of his establishing in the formal garden of his
suffered greatness such easy seats and short perspectives, such winding
paths and natural-looking waters, as would mercifully break up the
scale. You would perhaps indeed have reflected at the same time that the
thought of so much mercy was almost more than anything else the thought
of a great option and a great margin--in fine of fifty alternatives.
Which remarks of ours, however, leave his lordship with his last
immediate question on his hands.

"Well, yes--_that_, of course, in all propriety," his companion has
meanwhile replied to it. "But I was thinking a little, you understand,
of the importance of our own time."

Divinably Lord Theign put himself out less, as we may say, for
the comparatively matter-of-course haunters of his garden than for
interlopers even but slightly accredited. He seemed thus not at all to
strain to "understand" in this particular connection--it would be his
familiarly amusing friend Lord John, clearly, who must do most of the
work for him. "'Our