ut 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, Langham also walked rapidly home in a state
of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the
pockets of his overcoat.

'No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything your own
way so easily with me or with _her!_ You may break me, but you shall not
play upon me. And as for her, I will see it out--I will see it out!'

And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all about