lent thing, dear Biddy: no talent at all!"

"Well, yours is so real you can't help it."

"We shall see, we shall see," said Nick Dormer. "Let us go look at that
big group."

"We shall see if your talent's real?" Biddy went on as she accompanied
him.

"No; we shall see if, as you say, I can't help it. What nonsense Paris
makes one talk!" the young man added as they stopped in front of the
composition. This was true perhaps, but not in a sense he could find
himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from his first visit to
the French capital: he had often quitted England and usually made a
point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days there on the outward
journey to the Continent or on the return; but at present the feelings,
for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of air and of scene
had been more punctual and more acute than for a long time before, and
stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment, amusement, of the hundred
appeals from that quarter of thought to which on the whole his attention
was apt most frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was
fonder of Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps
as some other captivated aliens: the place had always had the virtue of
quickening in him sensibly the life of reflexion and observation. It was
a good while since his impressions had been so favourable to the city by
the Seine; a good while at all events since they had ministered so to
excitement, to exhilaration, to ambition, even to a restlessness that
was not prevented from being agreeable by the excess of agitation in it.
Nick could have given the reason of this unwonted glow, but his
preference was very much to keep it to himself. Certainly to persons not
deeply knowing, or at any rate not deeply curious, in relation to the
young man's history the explanation might have seemed to beg the
question, consisting as it did of the simple formula that he had at last
come to a crisis. Why a crisis--what was it and why had he not come to
it before? The reader shall learn these things in time if he cares
enough for them.

Our young man had not in any recent year failed to see the Salon, which
the general voice this season pronounced not particularly good. None the
less it was the present exhibition that, for some cause connected with
his "crisis," made him think fast, produced that effect he had spoken of
to his mother as a sense of artistic life. The precinct of the