ery day Victor was waylaid by him
at a corner of the Strand.

Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed
with Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on
self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to
Dudley's. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the
presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of
conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove
him to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be
bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley
to critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and
foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another
thing, she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a
tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she
seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having
to share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman's way, always
reassured by his endurance of Colney's company:--she read it to mean,
that he could bear Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor
had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve
his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young
Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to
Colney's acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter's antidote to
Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a
period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants
to be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not
performance, of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their
temperaments. Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of
the Nineteenth Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and
negatives divorced from harmony and awakened by the slight increase
of incubating motion to vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion
duellists for the rosy and the saturnine since the former cheerfully
slaved for a small stipend in the City of his affection, and the latter
entered on an inheritance counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew
a briefless barrister disposed for scholarship from the forlornest
of seats in the Courts. They had foretold of o