orial fashion, the arms were folded with
so conventional an ease.

CHAPTER VII.

Darrell and Lionel.

Darrell had received Lionel with some evident embarrassment, which soon
yielded to affectionate warmth. He took to the young man whose fortunes
he had so improved; he felt that with the improved fortunes the young
man's whole being was improved: assured position, early commune with the
best social circles, in which the equality of fashion smooths away all
disparities in rank, had softened in Lionel much of the wayward and
morbid irritability of his boyish pride; but the high spirit, the
generous love of independence, the scorn of mercenary calculation, were
strong as ever; these were in the grain of his nature. In common with
all who in youth aspire to be one day noted from the "undistinguishable
many," Lionel had formed to himself a certain ideal standard, above the
ordinary level of what the world is contented to call honest, or esteem
clever. He admitted into his estimate of life the heroic element, not
undesirable even in the most practical point of view, for the world is
so in the habit of decrying; of disbelieving in high motives and pure
emotions; of daguerreotyping itself with all its ugliest wrinkles,
stripped of the true bloom that brightens, of the true expression that
redeems, those defects which it invites the sun to limn, that we shall
never judge human nature aright, if we do not set out in life with our
gaze on its fairest beauties, and our belief in its latent good. In a
word we should begin with the Heroic, if we would learn the Human. But
though to himself Lionel thus secretly prescribed a certain superiority
of type, to be sedulously aimed at, even if never actually attained,
he was wholly without pedantry and arrogance towards his own
contemporaries. From this he was saved not only by good-nature, animal
spirits, frank hardihood, but by the very affluence of ideas which
animated his tongue, coloured his language, and whether to young or
old, wise or dull, made his conversation racy and original. He was a
delightful companion; and if he had taken much instruction from those
older and wiser than himself, he so bathed that instruction in the fresh
fountain of his own lively intelligence, so warmed it at his own
beating impulsive heart, that he could make an old man's gleanings from
experience seem a young man's guesses into truth. Faults he had, of
course,--chiefly the faults common at his