"Handsome! I did not say that," replied Madame de Ventadour, smiling; "it is rather a fine head than a handsome face. Is he clever, I wonder?--but all you English, milord, are well educated." "Yes, profound--profound: we are profound, not superficial," replied Lord Taunton, drawing down his wrist-bands. "Will Madame de Ventadour allow me to present to her one of my countrymen?" said the English minister approaching--"Mr. Maltravers." Madame de Ventadour half smiled and half blushed, as she looked up, and saw bent admiringly upon her the proud and earnest countenance she had remarked. The introduction made--a few monosyllables exchanged. The French diplomatist rose and walked away with the English one. Maltravers succeeded to the vacant chair. "Have you been long abroad?" asked Madame de Ventadour. "Only four years; yet long enough to ask whether I should not be most abroad in England." "You have been in the East--I envy you. And Greece, and Egypt,--all the associations! You have travelled back into the Past; you have escaped, as Madame D'Epinay wished, out of civilisation and into romance." "Yet Madame D'Epinay passed her own life in making pretty romances out of a very agreeable civilisation," said Maltravers, smiling. "You know her Memoirs, then," said Madame de Ventadour, slightly colouring. "In the current of a more exciting literature few have had time for the second-rate writings of a past century." "Are not those second-rate performances often the most charming," said Maltravers, "when the mediocrity of the intellect seems almost as if it were the effect of a touching, though too feeble, delicacy of sentiment? Madame D'Epinay's Memoirs are of this character. She was not a virtuous woman--but she felt virtue and loved it; she was not a woman of genius--but she was tremblingly alive to all the influences of genius. Some people seem born with the temperament and the tastes of genius without its creative power; they have its nervous system, but something is wanting in the intellectual. They feel acutely, yet express tamely. These persons always have in their character an unspeakable kind of pathos--a court civilisation produces many of them--and the French memoirs of the last century are particularly fraught with such examples. This is interesting--the struggle of sensitive minds against the lethargy of a society, dull, yet brilliant, that /glares/ them, as it were, to sleep. It comes home to us; for," added Maltravers, with a slight change of voice, "how many of us fancy we see our own image in the mirror!" And where was the German baron?--flirting at the other end of the room. And the English lord?--dropping monosyllables to dandies by the doorway. And the minor satellites?--dancing, whispering, making love, or sipping lemonade. And Madame de Ventadour was alone with the young stranger in a crowd of eight hundred persons; and their lips spoke of sentiment, and their eyes involuntarily applied it!