where he was going, and what he intended to say. He was not a man who
attracted attention in any way. He was small, yet not so small as to be
noticed for smallness; he was what is called plain-looking, yet without
that marked ugliness which, in a man, sometimes amounts to distinction.
As to his dress, he was too exact for carelessness; you felt that the
smallest spot on his loose flannel coat would trouble him; and yet he
was entirely without that trim, fresh, spring-morning appearance which
sometimes gives a small man an advantage over his larger brethren, as
the great coach-dogs seem suddenly coarse and dirty when the shining
little black-and-tan terrier bounds into the yard beside them. Stephen
was a man born into the world with an over-weight of caution and doubt.
They made the top of his head so broad and square that Reverence, who
likes a rounded curve, found herself displaced; she clung on desperately
through his schoolboy days, but was obliged at last to let go as the
youth began to try his muscles, shake off extraneous substances, and
find out what he really was himself, after the long succession of tutors
and masters had done with him.

The conceit of small men is proverbial, and Stephen was considered a
living etching of the proverb, without color, but sharply outlined. He
had a large fortune; he had a good intellect; he had no
vices--sufficient reasons, the world said, why he had become, at forty,
unendurably conceited. His life, the world considered, was but a
succession of conquests: and the quiet manner with which he entered a
drawing-room crowded with people, or stood apart and looked on, was but
another indication of that vanity of his which never faltered, even in
the presence of the most beautiful women or the most brilliant men. The
world had no patience with him. If he had not gone out in society at
all, if he had belonged to that large class of men who persistently
refuse to attire themselves in dress-coats and struggle through the
dance, the world would have understood it; but, on the contrary, Stephen
went everywhere, looking smaller and plainer than usual in his
evening-dress, asked everybody to dance, and fulfilled every social
obligation with painstaking exactitude. The world had no patience with
him; he was like a golden apple hanging low; but nobody could pull him
off the branch.

Stephen's conversation-friend (every unmarried man, though an
octogenarian, has his conversation-friend) was