filmy things and make them visible and distinct to ourselves, much
less to others. Why did he twice throw a look into the glass in the act
of passing it? He stood for a moment with head erect facing it. His
eyes for the nonce seemed little to peruse his outer features; the grey
gathered brows, and the wrinkles much action of them had traced over the
circles half up his high straight forehead; the iron-grey hair that rose
over his forehead and fell away in the fashion of Richard's plume. His
general appearance showed the tints of years; but none of their weight,
and nothing of the dignity of his youth, was gone. It was so far
satisfactory, but his eyes were wide, as one who looks at his essential
self through the mask we wear.

Perhaps he was speculating as he looked on the sort of aspect he
presented to the lady's discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had
not a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women
can, when it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite boiling
under the noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and put their
fingers on its weak point. He was cognizant of the total absence of the
humorous in himself (the want that most shut him out from his fellows),
and perhaps the clear-thoughted, intensely self-examining gentleman
filmily conceived, Me also, in common with the poet, she gazes on as one
of the superior--grey beasts!

He may have so conceived the case; he was capable of that
great-mindedness, and could snatch at times very luminous glances at the
broad reflector which the world of fact lying outside our narrow compass
holds up for us to see ourselves in when we will. Unhappily, the faculty
of laughter, which is due to this gift, was denied him; and having seen,
he, like the companion of friend Balsam, could go no farther. For a
good wind of laughter had relieved him of much of the blight of
self-deception, and oddness, and extravagance; had given a healthier
view of our atmosphere of life; but he had it not.

Journeying back to Bellingham in the train, with the heated brain and
brilliant eye of his son beside him, Sir Austin tried hard to feel
infallible, as a man with a System should feel; and because he could not
do so, after much mental conflict, he descended to entertain a personal
antagonism to the young woman who had stepped in between his experiment
and success. He did not think kindly of her. Lady Blandish's encomiums
of her behaviour and her beaut