ch, though frank, was somewhat cynical.

"This is not a favourable time to visit Paris," he said, "so far as
society is concerned. There is some business stirring in the diplomatic
world, which has re-assembled the fraternity for the moment, and the
King is at St. Cloud, but you may make some acquaintances which may be
desirable, and at any rate look about you and clear the ground for the
coming season. I do not despair of our dear friend coming over in the
winter. It is one of the hopes that keep me alive. What a woman! You
may count yourself fortunate in having such a friend. I do. I am not
particularly fond of female society. Women chatter too much. But I
prefer the society of a first-rate woman to that of any man; and Lady
Montfort is a first-rate woman--I think the greatest since Louise of
Savoy; infinitely beyond the Princess d'Ursins."

The "business that was then stirring in the diplomatic world," at a
season when the pleasures of Parisian society could not distract him,
gave Endymion a rare opportunity of studying that singular class of
human beings which is accustomed to consider states and nations as
individuals, and speculate on their quarrels and misunderstandings, and
the remedies which they require, in a tongue peculiar to themselves, and
in language which often conveys a meaning exactly opposite to that which
it seems to express. Diplomacy is hospitable, and a young Englishman
of graceful mien, well introduced, and a member of the House of
Commons--that awful assembly which produces those dreaded blue books
which strike terror in the boldest of foreign statesmen--was not only
received, but courted, in the interesting circle in which Endymion found
himself.

There he encountered men grey with the fame and wisdom of half a century
of deep and lofty action, men who had struggled with the first Napoleon,
and had sat in the Congress of Vienna; others, hardly less celebrated,
who had been suddenly borne to high places by the revolutionary wave
of 1830, and who had justly retained their exalted posts when so many
competitors with an equal chance had long ago, with equal justice,
subsided into the obscurity from which they ought never to have emerged.
Around these chief personages were others not less distinguished by
their abilities, but a more youthful generation, who knew how to wait,
and were always prepared or preparing for the inevitable occasion when
it arrived--fine and trained writers, who could int