d hollow cheeks?
but it is peculiar; it seems to think. You could have a talk with that
woman, if she were alive, on other subjects than dress, visiting, and
compliments."

I agreed with him, but did not say so. He went on.

"Not that I admire a head of that sort; it wants character and force;
there's too much of the sen-si-tive (so he articulated it, curling
his lip at the same time) in that mouth; besides, there is Aristocrat
written on the brow and defined in the figure; I hate your aristocrats."

"You think, then, Mr. Hunsden, that patrician descent may be read in a
distinctive cast of form and features?"

"Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may have
their 'distinctive cast of form and features' as much as we----shire
tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs assuredly. As
to their women, it is a little different: they cultivate beauty from
childhood upwards, and may by care and training attain to a certain
degree of excellence in that point, just like the oriental odalisques.
Yet even this superiority is doubtful. Compare the figure in that frame
with Mrs. Edward Crimsworth--which is the finer animal?"

I replied quietly: "Compare yourself and Mr. Edward Crimsworth, Mr
Hunsden."

"Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he has a
straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these advantages--if
they are advantages--he did not inherit from his mother, the patrician,
but from his father, old Crimsworth, who, MY father says, was as
veritable a ----shire blue-dyer as ever put indigo in a vat yet withal
the handsomest man in the three Ridings. It is you, William, who are
the aristocrat of your family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your
plebeian brother by long chalk."

There was something in Mr. Hunsden's point-blank mode of speech which
rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my ease. I
continued the conversation with a degree of interest.

"How do you happen to know that I am Mr. Crimsworth's brother? I thought
you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light of a poor
clerk."

"Well, and so we do; and what are you but a poor clerk? You do
Crimsworth's work, and he gives you wages--shabby wages they are, too."

I was silent. Hunsden's language now bordered on the impertinent, still
his manner did not offend me in the least--it only piqued my curiosity;
I wanted him to go on, which he did in a little while.

"This wo