I felt that if I insisted I should really stir up the old Long, the stolid coxcomb, capable of rudeness, with whose redemption, reabsorption, supersession--one scarcely knew what to call it--I had been so happily impressed. "Oh, of course, if you haven't noticed, you haven't, and the matter I was going to speak of will have no point. You won't know what I mean." With which I paused long enough to let his curiosity operate if his denial had been sincere. But it hadn't. His curiosity never operated. He only exclaimed, more indulgently, that he didn't know what I was talking about; and I recognised after a little that if I had made him, without intention, uncomfortable, this was exactly a proof of his being what Mrs. Briss, at the station, had called cleverer, and what I had so much remarked while, in the garden before dinner, he held our small company. Nobody, nothing could, in the time of his inanity, have made him turn a hair. It was the mark of his aggrandisement. But I spared him--so far as was consistent with my wish for absolute certainty; changed the subject, spoke of other things, took pains to sound disconnectedly, and only after reference to several of the other ladies, the name over which we had just felt friction. "Mrs. Brissenden's quite fabulous." He appeared to have strayed, in our interval, far. "'Fabulous'?" "Why, for the figure that, by candle-light and in cloth-of-silver and diamonds, she is still able to make." "Oh dear, yes!" He showed as relieved to be able to see what I meant. "She has grown so very much less plain." But that wasn't at all what I meant. "Ah," I said, "you put it the other way at Paddington--which was much more the right one." He had quite forgotten. "How then did I put it?" As he had done before, I got rid of my ash. "She hasn't grown very much less plain. She has only grown very much less old." "Ah, well," he laughed, but as if his interest had quickly dropped, "youth is--comparatively speaking--beauty." "Oh, not always. Look at poor Briss himself." "Well, if you like better, beauty is youth." "Not always, either," I returned. "Certainly only when it _is_ beauty. To see how little it may be either, look," I repeated, "at poor Briss." "I thought you told me just now not to!" He rose at last in his impatience. "Well, at present you can." I also got up, the other men at the same moment moved, and the subject of our reference stood in view. This indeed was but briefly, for, as if to examine a picture behind him, the personage in question suddenly turned his back. Long, however, had had time to take him in and then to decide. "I've looked. What then?" "You don't see anything?" "Nothing." "Not what everyone else must?" "No, confound you!"