ributes of his varying, complex, uncomprehended character;
not professedly confiding, but not taking pains to conceal. Hearing what
worldlings would call "Sentiment" in Lionel, he seemed to glide softly
down to Lionel's own years and talk "sentiment" in return. After all,
this skilled lawyer, this noted politician, had a great dash of the boy
still in him. Reader, did you ever meet a really clever man who had not?

CHAPTER VIII.

Saith a very homely proverb (pardon its vulgarity), "You cannot make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear." But a sow's ear is a much finer
work of art than a silk purse; and grand, indeed, the mechanician
who could make a sow's ear out of a silk purse, or conjure into
creatures of flesh and blood the sarcenet and _tulle_ of a London
drawing-room.

"Mamma," asked Honoria Carr Vipont, "what sort of a person was Mrs.
Darrell?"

"She was not in our set, my dear," answered Lady Selina. "The Vipont
Crookes are just one of those connections with which, though of course
one is civil to all connections, one is more or less intimate according
as they take after the Viponts or after the Crookes. Poor woman! she
died just before Mr. Darrell entered Parliament and appeared in society.
But I should say she was not an agreeable person. Not nice," added
Lady Selina, after a pause, and conveying a world of meaning in that
conventional monosyllable.

"I suppose she was very accomplished, very clever?"

"Quite the reverse, my dear. Mr. Darrell was exceedingly young when he
married, scarcely of age. She was not the sort of woman to suit him."

"But at least she must have been very much attached to him, very proud
of him?"

Lady Selina glanced aside from her work, and observed her daughter's
face, which evinced an animation not usual to a young lady of a breeding
so lofty, and a mind so well disciplined.

"I don't think," said Lady Selina, "that she was proud of him. She would
have been proud of his station, or rather of that to which his fame and
fortune would have raised her, had she lived to enjoy it. But for a few
years after her marriage they were very poor; and though his rise at
the bar was sudden and brilliant, he was long wholly absorbed in his
profession, and lived in Bloomsbury. Mrs. Darrell was not proud of that.
The Crookes are generally fine, give themselves airs, marry into great
houses if they can: but we can't naturalize them; they always remain
Crookes,--useful conne