hn's entry into Parliament as a Liberal was
taken for a sign of steersman who knew where the tide ran. But your
Liberals are sometimes Radicals in their youth, and his choice of parties
might not be so much sagacity as an instance of unripe lightheadedness. A
young conservative millionaire is less disturbing. The very wealthy young
peer is never wanton in his politics, which seems to admonish us that the
heir of vast wealth should have it imposed on him to accept a peerage,
and be locked up as it were. A coronet steadies the brain. You may let
out your heels at the social laws, you are almost expected to do it, but
you are to shake that young pate of yours restively under such a splendid
encumbrance. Private reports of John, however, gave him credit for sound
opinions: he was moderate, merely progressive. When it was added that the
man had the habit of taking counsel with his sister, he was at once
considered as fast and safe, not because of any public knowledge of the
character of Jane Mattock. We pay this homage to the settled common sense
of women. Distinctly does she discountenance leaps in the dark, wild
driving, and the freaks of Radicalism.

John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the
individual Jane. He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his
bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct. He
gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in
affection. There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even
from intimate communication with himself. These he could not reveal; nor
could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason. They both
had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above the
positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a
trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were
sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by
what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for
doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and they
were separately aware of an inward smile at one another's partial
deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the
respected ideal. The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook
them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated picture
they were to the eyes best loved by them. This in fact was their life.
Anything beside it was