-to
herself, I mean. She exaggerates you and me!"

There was nothing in that description to allay the agitation caused in
our younger friend by such a sketch of a fine subject. It seemed to him
to show the art of St. George's admired hand, and he lost himself in
gazing at the vision--this hovered there before him--of a woman's figure
which should be part of the glory of a novel. But at the end of a moment
the thing had turned into smoke, and out of the smoke--the last puff of a
big cigar--proceeded the voice of General Fancourt, who had left the
others and come and planted himself before the gentlemen on the sofa. "I
suppose that when you fellows get talking you sit up half the night."

"Half the night?--jamais de la vie! I follow a hygiene"--and St. George
rose to his feet.

"I see--you're hothouse plants," laughed the General. "That's the way
you produce your flowers."

"I produce mine between ten and one every morning--I bloom with a
regularity!" St. George went on.

"And with a splendour!" added the polite General, while Paul noted how
little the author of "Shadowmere" minded, as he phrased it to himself,
when addressed as a celebrated story-teller. The young man had an idea
_he_ should never get used to that; it would always make him
uncomfortable--from the suspicion that people would think they had to--and
he would want to prevent it. Evidently his great colleague had toughened
and hardened--had made himself a surface. The group of men had finished
their cigars and taken up their bedroom candlesticks; but before they all
passed out Lord Watermouth invited the pair of guests who had been so
absorbed together to "have" something. It happened that they both
declined; upon which General Fancourt said: "Is that the hygiene? You
don't water the flowers?"

"Oh I should drown them!" St. George replied; but, leaving the room still
at his young friend's side, he added whimsically, for the latter's
benefit, in a lower tone: "My wife doesn't let me."

"Well I'm glad I'm not one of you fellows!" the General richly concluded.

The nearness of Summersoft to London had this consequence, chilling to a
person who had had a vision of sociability in a railway-carriage, that
most of the company, after breakfast, drove back to town, entering their
own vehicles, which had come out to fetch them, while their servants
returned by train with their luggage. Three or four young men, among
whom was Paul Overt, also availe