to demand of his entertainer why the mischief he had hurried him so out of the public-house if he had not been waiting there preconcertedly for Millicent. We know that in Hyacinth’s eyes one of this young lady’s compensatory merits had been that she was not deceitful, and he asked himself if a girl could change that way from one month to the other. This was optimistic, but, all the same, before leaving the Pavilion he decided with one of his highest flights of intelligence that he could quite well see what Lady Aurora had meant by calling Captain Sholto vulgar. XXI Paul Muniment had fits of silence while the others were talking; but on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he talked Hyacinth listened almost to the retention of breath, and when he said nothing watched him fixedly, listening to the others only through the medium of his candid countenance. At the “Sun and Moon” Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and Hyacinth even divined him at moments bored or irritated by the serious manner in which his small worrying bookbinder couldn’t conceal from the world that he regarded him. He wondered if this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of the superior brutality latent in his composition and which, without an intention of direct harshness, was naturally impatient of palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the “Sun and Moon”; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much crude fatuity and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying, “Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to—what I say I stick to”; and others who perpetually inquired of the company, “And what the plague am I to do with seventeen bob—with seventeen bloody bob? What am I to do with them—will ye tell me that?” an interrogation which in truth usually ended by producing a ribald reply. There were still others who remarked to satiety that if it was not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up the Park rails again, just to haul ’em straight up. A little shoemaker with red eyes and a greyish face, whose appearance Hyacinth deplored, scarcely ever expressed himself but in the same form of words: “Well, are we in earnest or ain’t we in earnest?—that’s the thing _I_ want to know.” He was terribly in earnest himself, but this was almost the only way he had of showing it; and he had much in common (though they were always squabbling) with a large red-faced man, of