"I quite agree with you, Lady May," said Arden. "He is, take him on every subject, I think, about the cleverest fellow I ever met--art, literature, games, _chess_, which I take to be a subject by itself. He is very great at chess--for an amateur, I mean--and when I was chess-mad, nearly a year ago and beginning to grow conceited, he opened my eyes, I can tell you; and Airly says he is the best musical critic in England, and can tell you at any hour who is who in the opera, all over Europe; and he really understands, what so few of us here know anything about, foreign politics, and all the people and their stories and scandals he has at his fingers' ends. And he is such good company, when he chooses, and such a gentleman always!" "He is very agreeable and amusing when he takes the trouble; I always like to listen when Mr. Longcluse talks," said Alice Arden, to the secret satisfaction of her brother, whose enthusiasm was, I think, directed a good deal to her--and to, perhaps, the vexation of other people, whom she did not care at that moment to please. "An Admirable Crichton!" murmured Vivian Darnley, with a rather hackneyed sneer. "Do you like his style of--_beauty_, I suppose I should call it? It has the merit of being very uncommon, at least, don't you think?" "Beauty, I think, matters very little. He has no beauty, but his face has what, in a man, I think a great deal better--I mean refinement, and cleverness, and a kind of satire that rather interests one," said Miss Arden, with animation. Sir Walter Scott, in his "Rob Roy"--thinking, no doubt, of the Diana Vernon of his early days, the then beautiful lady, long afterwards celebrated by Basil Hall as the old Countess Purgstorf (if I rightly remember the title), and recurring to some cherished incident, and the thrill of a pride that had ceased to agitate, but was at once pleasant and melancholy to remember--wrote these words: "She proceeded to read the first stanza, which was nearly to the following purpose. [Then follow the verses.] 'There is a great deal of it,' said she, glancing along the paper, and interrupting the sweetest sounds that mortal ears can drink in--those of a youthful poet's verses, namely, read by the lips which are dearest to them." So writes Walter Scott. On the other hand, in certain states, is there a pain intenser than that of listening to the praises of another man from the lips we love? "Well," said Darnley, "as you say so, I suppose there is all that, though I can't see it. Of course, if he tries to make himself agreeable (which he never does to me), it makes a difference, it affects everything--it affects even his looks. But I should not have thought him good-looking. On the contrary, he appears to me about as ugly a fellow as one could see in a day." "He's not that," said Alice. "No one could be ugly with so much animation and so much expression."