r as resting firmly enough on
some felt residuum of advantage: whether this were cleverness or luck,
the strength of his backing or that of his sincerity. Even with the
young woman to whom our friends' reference thus broadened still a
vague quantity for us, you would have taken his sincerity as quite
possible--and this despite an odd element in him that you might have
described as a certain delicacy of brutality. This younger son of
a noble matron recognised even by himself as terrible enjoyed in
no immediate or aggressive manner any imputable private heritage
or privilege of arrogance. He would on the contrary have irradiated
fineness if his lustre hadn't been a little prematurely dimmed. Active
yet insubstantial, he was slight and short and a trifle too punctually,
though not yet quite lamentably, bald. Delicacy was in the arch of his
eyebrow, the finish of his facial line, the economy of "treatment"
by which his negative nose had been enabled to look important and his
meagre mouth to smile its spareness away.

He had pleasant but hard little eyes--they glittered, handsomely,
without promise--and a neatness, a coolness and an ease, a clear
instinct for making point take, on his behalf, the place of weight and
immunity that of capacity, which represented somehow the art of living
at a high pitch and yet at a low cost. There was that in his satisfied
air which still suggested sharp wants--and this was withal the
ambiguity; for the temper of these appetites or views was certainly,
you would have concluded, not such as always to sacrifice to form. If he
really, for instance, wanted Lady Grace, the passion or the sense of his
interest in it would scarce have been considerately irritable.

"May I ask what you mean," he inquired of Lady Sandgate, "by the
question of my 'arranging'?"

"I mean that you're the very clever son of a very clever mother."

"Oh, I'm less clever than you think," he replied--"if you really think
it of me at all; and mamma's a good sight cleverer!"

"Than I think?" Lady Sandgate echoed. "Why, she's the person in all our
world I would gladly most resemble--for her general ability to put what
she wants through." But she at once added: "That is _if_--!" pausing on
it with a smile.

"If what then?"

"Well, if I could be absolutely certain to have all in her kinds of
cleverness without exception--and to have them," said Lady Sandgate, "to
the very end."

He definitely, he almost contemptuously dec