“Exactly,” said my father; “because to every question there are two sides, and you look at them both.” “You have said it,” answered Trevanion, smiling also. “For public life a man should be one-sided; he must act with a party; and a party insists that the shield is silver, when, if it will take the trouble to turn the corner, it will see that the reverse of the shield is gold. Wo to the man who makes that discovery alone, while his party are still swearing the shield is silver, and that not once in his life, but every night!” “You have said quite enough to convince me that you ought not to belong to a party, but not enough to convince me why you should not be happy,” said my father. “Do you remember,” said Sir Sedley Beaudesert, “an anecdote of the first Duke of Portland? He had a gallery in the great stable of his villa in Holland, where a concert was given once a-week, to _cheer and amuse_ his horses! I have no doubt the horses thrived all the better for it. What Trevanion wants is a concert once a-week. With him it is always saddle and spur. Yet, after all, who would not envy him? If life be a drama, his name stands high in the playbill, and is printed in capitals on the walls.” “Envy ME!” cried Trevanion—“ME!—no, you are the enviable man—you who have only one grief in the world, and that so absurd a one, that I will make you blush by disclosing it. Hear, O sage Austin!—O sturdy Roland!—Olivares was haunted by a spectre, and Sedley Beaudesert by the dread of old age!” “Well,” said my mother seriously, “I do think it requires a great sense of religion, or, at all events, children of one’s own, in whom one is young again, to reconcile one’s-self to becoming old.” “My dear ma’am,” said Sir Sedley, who had slightly coloured at Trevanion’s charge, but had now recovered his easy self-possession, “you have spoken so admirably that you give me courage to confess my weakness. I do dread to be old. All the joys of my life have been the joys of youth. I have had so exquisite a pleasure in the mere sense of living, that old age, as it comes near, terrifies me by its dull eyes and gray hairs. I have lived the life of the butterfly. Summer is over, and I see my flowers withering; and my wings are chilled by the first airs of winter. Yes, I envy Trevanion; for, in public life, no man is ever young; and while he can work he is never old.” “My dear Beaudesert,” said my father, “when St Amable, patron saint of Riom, in Auvergne, went to Rome, the sun waited upon him as a servant, carried his cloak and gloves for him in the heat, and kept off the rain, if the weather changed, like an umbrella. You want to put the sun to the same use; you are quite right; but then, you see, you must first be a saint before you can be sure of the sun as a servant.”