to such secrets of his life
as he chose to conceal where he had been born, reared, and educated; how
he came to be thrown on his own resources; how he had contrived, how he
had subsisted, were all matters on which he had seemed to take an oath
to Harpocrates, the god of silence. And yet he was full of anecdotes of
what he had seen, of strange companions whom he never named, but with
whom he had been thrown. And, to do him justice, I remarked that though
his precocious experience seemed to have been gathered from the holes
and corners, the sewers and drains of life, and though he seemed wholly
without dislike to dishonesty, and to regard virtue or vice with as
serene an indifference as some grand poet who views them both merely
as ministrants to his art, yet he never betrayed any positive breach
of honesty in himself. He could laugh over the story of some ingenious
fraud that he had witnessed, and seem insensible to its turpitude; but
he spoke of it in the tone of an approving witness, not of an actual
accomplice. As we grew more intimate, he felt gradually, however, that
pudor, or instinctive shame, which the contact with minds habituated
to the distinctions between wrong and right unconsciously produces, and
such stories ceased. He never but once mentioned his family, and that
was in the following odd and abrupt manner:--

"Ah!" cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, "how that
reminds me of my dear, dear mother."

"Which?" said I, eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle's
"Madonna" and another of "The Brigand's Wife."

Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my
reluctance.

"You loved your mother, then?" said I, after a pause. "Yes, as a whelp
may a tigress."

"That's a strange comparison."

"Or a bull-dog may the prize-fighter, his master! Do you like that
better?"

"Not much; is it a comparison your mother would like?"

"Like? She is dead!" said he, rather falteringly.

I pressed his arm closer to mine.

"I understand you," said he, with his cynic, repellent smile. "But you
do wrong to feel for my loss. I feel for it; but no one who cares for me
should sympathize with my grief."

"Why?"

"Because my mother was not what the world would call a good woman. I did
not love her the less for that. And now let us change the subject."

"Nay; since you have said so much, Vivian, let me coax you to say on. Is
not your father living?"

"Is not the Monument s