spapers, and see how differently things will go on at
Naples after I arrive there."

"Tell me something about home, Skeffy; I want to hear about Tilney. Whom
did you leave there when you came away?"

"I left the Lyles, Alice and Bella,--none else. I was to have gone back
with them to Lyle Abbey if I had stayed till Monday, and I left them, of
course, very disconsolate, and greatly put out."

"I suppose you made up to Alice. I thought you would," said Tony, half
sulkily.

"No, old fellow, you do me wrong; that's a thing I never do. As I
said to Ernest Palfi about Pauline Esterhazy, I 'll take no unfair
advantage,--I 'll take no steps in your absence; and Alice saw this
herself."

"How do you mean? Alice saw it?" said Tony, reddening.

"She saw it, for she said to me one day, 'Mr. Damer, it seems to me you
have very punctilious notions on the score of friendship.'

"'I have,' said I; 'you 're right there.'

"'I thought so,' said she."

"After all," said Tony, in a half-dogged tone, "I don't see that the
speech had any reference to me, or to any peculiar delicacy of yours
with respect to me."

"Ah, my poor Tony, you have a deal to learn about women and their ways!
By good luck fortune has given you a friend--the one man--I declare I
believe what I say--the one man in Europe that knows the whole thing; as
poor Balzac used to say, '_Cher_ Skeffy, what a fellow you would be if
you had my pen!' He was a vain creature, Balzac; but what he meant was,
if I could add his descriptive power to my own knowledge of life; for
you see, Tony, this was the difference between Balzac and me. He knew
Paris and the salons of Paris, and the women who frequent these salons.
I knew the human, heart. It was woman, as a creature, not a mere
conventionality, that she appeared to me."

"Well, I take it," grumbled out Tony, "you and your friend had some
points of resemblance too."

"Ah! you would say that we were both vain. So we were, Tony,--so is
every man that is the depository of a certain power. Without this same
conscious thought, which you common folk call vanity, how should we come
to exercise the gift! The little world taunts us with the very quality
that is the essence of our superiority."

"Had Bella perfectly recovered? was she able to be up and about?"

"Yes, she was able to take carriage airings, and to be driven about in a
small phaeton by the neatest whip in Europe."

"Mr. Skeff Damer, eh?"

"The same. Ah, these d