Those were characteristic and sufficient. His mental suspense, his perpetual soul-hunger, never seemed to affect his winning attitude towards his surroundings. Outwardly he appeared that lovable, interested, oddly humorous creature who, endearing himself, without effort or design, to all about him, seemed troubled by no sense of responsibility towards anybody or anything in the world. He could not help himself there; the faculty of ingratiation was native to him and quite unforced. But it is wrong to judge such qualities as necessarily superficial. Popularly, the sparkling surface speaks the shallow current: it is as true as to insist that beauty is only skin deep. There are many of these old saws that need re-casting. Is there no deep thinker who has his playful side? It was sage Harcourt, was it not, whose “half-awakened bards” so offended the poet? As to exteriority, one might say, with as true a proverbial sententiousness, that the pint bottle of champagne is not to be told from the magnum by its effervescence. The fact is that manner is no indication of matter, and that some men can jest under torture while others cannot. It is just a question of constitution. Think of Keats, confined in quarantine on his death journey, desperately summoning up more puns in a week than he had ever been guilty of in a year. So, as il Signor Talé loitered in the wakening gardens, asking innumerable questions, making innumerable impracticable suggestions, delightedly absorbed, to all appearance, in floricultural lore, no one might have guessed from those rising bubbles the darkness of the tragic deeps from which they ascended.