ovely
woman's instinct told her this, so that she was very fond of Barty
in return.

He was especially popular with sweet, pretty young girls, to whom
his genial, happy, paternal manner always endeared him. They felt as
safe with Barty as with any father or uncle, for all his facetious
love-making; he made them laugh, and they loved him for it, and they
forgot his Apolloship, and his Lionhood, and his general Immensity,
which he never remembered himself.

It is to be feared that women who lacked the heavenly gift of good
looks did not interest him quite so much, whatever other gifts they
might possess, unless it were the gift of making lovely music. The
little brown nightingale outshone the brilliant bird of paradise if
she were a true nightingale; if she were very brown indeed, he would
shut his eyes and listen with all his ears, rapt, as in a heavenly
dream. And the closed lids would moisten, especially the lid that
hid the eye that couldn't see--the emotional one!--although he was
the least lachrymose of men, since it was with such a dry eye he
wrote what I could scarcely read for my tears.

But his natural kindliness and geniality made him always try and
please those who tried to please him, beautiful or the reverse,
whether they succeeded or not; and he was just as popular with the
ducks and geese as with the swans and peacocks and nightingales and
birds of paradise. The dull, commonplace dames who prosed and buzzed
and bored, the elderly intellectual virgins who knew nothing of life
but what they had read--or written--in "Tendenz" novels, yet sadly
rebuked him, more in sorrow than in anger, for this passage or that
in his books, about things out of their ken altogether, etc.

His playful amenity disarmed the most aggressive bluestocking, orthodox
or Unitarian, Catholic or Hebrew--radicals, agnostics, vegetarians,
teetotalers, anti-vaccinationists, anti-vivisectionists--even
anti-things that don't concern decent women at all, whether married or
single.

It was only when his privacy was invaded by some patronizing,
loud-voiced nouvelle-riche with a low-bred physiognomy that no
millions on earth could gild or refine, and manners to match; some
foolish, fashionable, would-be worldling, who combined the arch
little coquetries and impertinent affectations of a spoilt beauty
with the ugliness of an Aztec or an Esquimau; some silly, titled old
frump who frankly ignored his tea-making wife and daughters and
talked