im; he had never become one of those old men
who ramble round and round the fields of reminiscence. Himself quickly
fatigued by the insensitive, he instinctively avoided fatiguing others,
and his natural flirtatiousness towards beauty guarded him specially in
his relations with a woman. He would have liked to draw her out, but
though she murmured and smiled and seemed to be enjoying what he told
her, he remained conscious of that mysterious remoteness which
constituted half her fascination. He could not bear women who threw
their shoulders and eyes at you, and chattered away; or hard-mouthed
women who laid down the law and knew more than you did. There was only
one quality in a woman that appealed to him--charm; and the quieter it
was, the more he liked it. And this one had charm, shadowy as afternoon
sunlight on those Italian hills and valleys he had loved. The feeling,
too, that she was, as it were, apart, cloistered, made her seem nearer to
himself, a strangely desirable companion. When a man is very old and
quite out of the running, he loves to feel secure from the rivalries of
youth, for he would still be first in the heart of beauty. And he drank
his hock, and watched her lips, and felt nearly young. But the dog
Balthasar lay watching her lips too, and despising in his heart the
interruptions of their talk, and the tilting of those greenish glasses
full of a golden fluid which was distasteful to him.

The light was just failing when they went back into the music-room. And,
cigar in mouth, old Jolyon said:

"Play me some Chopin."

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the
texture of men's souls. Old Jolyon could not bear a strong cigar or
Wagner's music. He loved Beethoven and Mozart, Handel and Gluck, and
Schumann, and, for some occult reason, the operas of Meyerbeer; but of
late years he had been seduced by Chopin, just as in painting he had
succumbed to Botticelli. In yielding to these tastes he had been
conscious of divergence from the standard of the Golden Age. Their
poetry was not that of Milton and Byron and Tennyson; of Raphael and
Titian; Mozart and Beethoven. It was, as it were, behind a veil; their
poetry hit no one in the face, but slipped its fingers under the ribs and
turned and twisted, and melted up the heart. And, never certain that
this was healthy, he did not care a rap so long as he could see the
pictures of the one or hear the music of the other.