"You're a severe censor of the age we live in, I see," said Harcourt,
smiling. "At the same time, the offences could scarcely give you
much uneasiness, or you 'd not take up your residence where they most
abound."

"If you want to destroy tigers, you must frequent the jungle," said
Scaresby, with one of his heartiest laughs.

"Say, rather, if you have the vulture's appetite, you must go where
there is carrion!" cried Glencore, with a voice to which passion lent a
savage vehemence.

"Eh? ha! very good! devilish smart of your sick friend. Pray present me
to him," said Scaresby, rising.

"No, no, never mind him," whispered Harcourt, pressing him down into
his seat. "At some other time, perhaps. He is nervous and irritable.
Conversation fatigues him, too."

"Egad! that was neatly said, though; I hope I shall not forget it.
One envies these sick fellows, sometimes, the venom they get from bad
health. But I am forgetting myself in the pleasure of your society,"
added he, rising from the table, as he finished off the last glass in
the decanter. "I shall call at Downing Street to-morrow for that letter
of Upton's, and, with your permission, will deposit it in your hands
afterwards."

Harcourt accompanied him to the door with thanks. Profuse, indeed, was
he in his recognitions, desiring to get him clear off the ground before
any further allusions on his part, or rejoinders from Glencore, might
involve them all in new complications.

"I know that fellow well," cried Glencore, almost ere the door closed on
him. "He is just what I remember him some twenty years ago. Dressed up
in the cast-off vices of his betters, he has passed for a man of fashion
amongst his own set, while he is regarded as a wit by those who mistake
malevolence for humor. I ask no other test of a society than that such a
man is endured in it."

"I sometimes suspect," said Harcourt, "that the world never believes
these fellows to be as ill-natured as then-tongues bespeak them."

"You are wrong, George; the world knows them well. The estimation they
are held in is, for the reflective flattery by which each listener to
their sarcasms soothes his own conscience as he says, 'I could be just
as bitter, if I consented to be as bad.'''

"I cannot at all account for Upton's endurance of such a man," said
Harcourt.

"As there are men who fancy that they strengthen their animal system by
braving every extreme of climate, so Upton imagines that he invigorate