akes a cynical critic. A sentimentalism requires secresy. I can
enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide it to me
alone; but I and my friends must laugh at it outright.

"Does there not seem a soul in the moonlight?" for instance. Arabella,
after a rapturous glance at the rosy orb, put it to Mr. Pericles, in
subdued impressive tones. She had to repeat her phrase; Mr. Pericles then
echoing, with provoking monotony of tone, "Sol?"--whereupon "Soul!" was
reiterated, somewhat sharply: and Mr. Pericles, peering over the collar
of the bear, with half an eye, continued the sentence, in the manner of
one sent thereby farther from its meaning: "Ze moonlight?" Despairing and
exasperated, Arabella commenced afresh: "I said, there seems a soul in
it"; and Mr. Pericles assented bluntly: "In ze light!"--which sounded so
little satisfactory that Arabella explained, "I mean the aspect;" and
having said three times distinctly what she meant, in answer to a
terrific glare from the unsubmerged whites of the eyes of Mr. Pericles,
this was his comment, almost roared forth:

"Sol! you say so-whole--in ze moonlight--Luna? Hein? Ze aspect is of
Sol!--Yez."

And Mr. Pericles sank into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was
swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr. Sumner, a
rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of
extreme rigidity. Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth. She
heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and Mr.
Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was well
sustained, while her heart was kept thirsting for the key to it. In
advance were Adela and Edward Buxley, who was only a rich alderman's only
son, but had the virtue of an extraordinary power of drawing caricatures,
and was therefore useful in exaggerating the features of disagreeable
people, and showing how odious they were: besides endearing pleasant ones
exhibiting how comic they could be. Gossips averred that before Mr. Pole
had been worried by his daughters into giving that mighty sum for
Brookfield, Arabella had accepted Edward as her suitor; but for some
reason or other he had apparently fallen from his high estate. To tell
the truth, Arabella conceived that he had simply obeyed her wishes, while
he knew he was naughtily following his own; and Adela, without
introspection at all, was making her virgin effort at the caricaturing of
our sex in hi