His cousin Georges was at least a dozen years his elder, and nearly a head shorter than he. Many persons declared that he looked like a jockey; they were wrong. He looked like what he was, a prodigal son, very well-born. Spare in figure, his face smoothly shaven, except for a long sandy moustache, his hair quite gray, and brushed up from the temples after a vanished fashion, his features keen and mobile, his eyes round as a bird's, his carriage rather stooping and with motions characterized by a certain negligence, he produced the impression of a man who had seen a great deal of the world, and who now took a philosophic view of his life and of his position. Oswald is the heir, Georges is the next to inherit. Scarcely were the usual formal greetings over when Oswald made an attempt to join his pretty cousin Gabrielle, with the laudable purpose of helping her to pour out tea. His design was cruelly frustrated, however, by Count Truyn, who instantly engaged him in a brisk discussion of the latest anti-Catholic measures on the part of the Republic. Oswald sat beside his uncle restlessly drumming on the brim of his opera-hat, the image of politely-concealed youthful impatience, now and then adding an "abominable!" or a "disgusting," to the indignant expressions of the elder man, and all the while glancing towards Gabrielle. Certain personal matters interested him far more just now than the deplorable excesses of the French government. He had not read the article in the _Temps_ to which his uncle alluded, he did not take the French Republic at all in earnest, he considered it in fact no Republic at all, but only a monarchy gone mad; French politics interested him from an ethnographical point of view only, all which he calmly confessed to his uncle, by whom he was scolded as "unpardonably indifferent," and "culpably blind." The elder man's conservative philippics grew more eager, and the younger one's courteous admissions more vague, until at last Zinka succeeded in releasing the latter by asking Gabrielle to sing something. Gabrielle, of course, declared that she was hoarse, but Oswald who was, by the way, about as much interested in her singing from a musical point of view as in the trumpet-solos of the emperor of Russia, smiled away her objections and rising, with a sigh of relief, went to open the grand piano.