"Sing _out_, man--sing _out_!" said the big bass. And Barty shouted his loudest--a method which did not suit him. I sat in the pit, with half a dozen Guardsmen, who were deeply interested in Barty's operatic aspirations. It turned out that Barty was neither tenor nor barytone; and that his light voice, so charming in a room, would never do for the operatic stage; although his figure, in spite of his great height, would have suited heroic parts so admirably. Besides, three or four years' training in Italy were needed--a different production altogether. So Barty gave up this idea and made up his mind to be an artist. He got permission to work in the British Museum, and drew the "Discobolus," and sent his drawing to the Royal Academy, in the hope of being admitted there as a student. He was not. Then an immense overwhelming homesickness for Paris came over him, and he felt he must go and study art there, and succeed or perish. My father talked to him like a father, my mother like a mother; we all hung about him and entreated. He was as obdurate as Tennyson's sailor-boy whom the mermaiden forewarned so fiercely! He was even offered a handsome appointment in the London house of Vougeot-Conti & Co. But his mind was made up, and to my sorrow, and the sorrow of all who knew him, he fixed the date of his departure for the 2d of May (1856),--this being the day after a party at the Gibsons'--a young dance in honor of Leah's fifteenth birthday, on the 1st--and to which my sister had procured him an invitation. He had never been to the Gibsons' before. They belonged to a world so different to anything he had been accustomed to--indeed, to a class that he then so much disliked and despised (both as ex-Guardsman and as the descendant of French toilers of the sea, who hate and scorn the bourgeois)--that I was curious to see how he would bear himself there; and rather nervous, for it would have grieved me that he should look down on people of whom I was getting very fond. It was his theory that all successful business people were pompous and purse-proud and vulgar. I admit that in the fifties we very often were. There may perhaps be a few survivals of that period: _old_ nouveaux riches, who are still modestly jocose on the subject of each other's millions when they meet, and indulge in pompous little pleasantries about their pet economics, and drop a pompous little _h_ now and then, and pretend they only did it for fun. But, dear me, there are other things to be vulgar about in this world besides money and uncertain aspirates.