'Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his
tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and mental
strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with a
_nonchalance_ I cannot convey: "Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should
have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while."
"Why?" said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn't know--wouldn't
say. But I gathered that, according to him, Elsmere is still swathed in
such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags and patches
he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort of the change. It
seemed to me the tone of the very cool spectator, rather than the
friend. However--does your sister like him?'

'I don't know,' said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the face.

Hugh Flaxman's fair complexion flushed a little. He got up to go.

He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I ever saw,' he
remarked as he buttoned up his coat. 'Don't you think so?'

'Yes,' said Agnes dubiously, 'if he didn't stoop, and if he didn't in
general look half-asleep.'

Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the reason for the
constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti-social person at the
Leyburns' house. Being himself a man of very subtle and fastidious
tastes, he could imagine that so original a suitor, with such eyes, such
an intellectual reputation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and
the most picturesque capacity for silence, _might_ have attractions for
a romantic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose rarely
talked to him, and was always ready to make him the target of a
sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to him, and Mrs.
Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. Elsmere, too, seemed to
dislike him, and yet there he was, week after week. Flaxman could not
make it out.

Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started various topics with
him--University reform, politics, music. In vain. In his most
characteristic Oxford days Langham had never assumed a more wholesale
ignorance of all subjects in heaven and earth, and never stuck more
pertinaciously to the flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked away
at last boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is
perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom.

However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of these
fragments of conversation Lan