His frankness was apparent in his talk on all matters immediately before us; in the utter absence of all effort to make himself seem better than he was. His reserve was equally shown in the ingenious evasion of every species of confidence that could admit me into such secrets of his life as he chose to conceal: where he had been born, reared, and educated; how he came to be thrown on his own resources; how he had contrived, how he had subsisted, were all matters on which he seemed to have taken an oath to Harpocrates, the god of silence. And yet he was full of anecdotes of what he had seen, of strange companions, whom he never named, but into whose society he had been thrown. And, to do him justice, I remarked that, though his precocious experience seemed to have been gathered from the holes and corners, the sewers and drains of life, and though he seemed wholly without dislike to dishonesty, and to regard virtue or vice with as serene an indifference as some grand poet who views them both merely as ministrants to his art, yet he never betrayed any positive breach of honesty in himself. He could laugh over the story of some ingenious fraud that he had witnessed, and seem insensible to its turpitude; but he spoke of it in the tone of an unreproving witness, not of an actual accomplice. As we grew more intimate, he felt gradually, however, that _pudor_, or instinctive shame, which the contact with minds habituated to the distinctions between wrong and right unconsciously produces,--and such stories ceased. He never but once mentioned his family, and that was in the following odd and abrupt manner,-- "Ah!" cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, "how that reminds me of my dear, dear mother." "Which?" said I eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle's "Madonna," and another of "The Brigand's Wife." Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my reluctance. "You loved your mother, then?" said I, after a pause. "Yes, as a whelp may a tigress." "That's a strange comparison." "Or a bull-dog may the prizefighter, his master! Do you like that better?" "Not much; is it a comparison your mother would like?" "Like!--she is dead!" said he, rather falteringly. I pressed his arm closer to mine. "I understand you," said he, with his cynic repellant smile. "But you do wrong to feel for my loss. I feel for it; but no one who cares for me should sympathise with my grief." "Why?" "Because my mother was not what the world would call a good woman. I did not love her the less for that--and now let us change the subject." "Nay; since you have said so much, Vivian, let me coax you to say on. Is not your father living?" "Is not the Monument standing?" "I suppose so,--what of that?" "Why, it matters very little to either of us; and my question answers yours!"