"Oh!" said Bertha, in a low, rather hurried voice, "he had a blow. There is no mistake about that,--he had a blow, and there was a good deal in him that did not survive it." "And yet he doesn't strike you as being that sort of fellow," said Richard, still in reflection. "You wouldn't think of him as being a fellow with a grief." Bertha broke into delighted laughter. "A grief!" she exclaimed. "That is very good. I wish he had heard it. A grief! I wonder what he would do with it in his moments of recreation,--at receptions, for instance, and _musicales_, and germans. He might conceal it in his opera hat, but I am afraid it would be in the way. Poor Larry! Griefs are as much out of fashion as stateliness, and he not only couldn't indulge in one if he would, but he wouldn't if he could." "Well, how would you put it," said Richard, "if you did not call it a grief?" Bertha laughed again. "If I put it at all," she answered, "I would say that he had once been very uncomfortable, but had discreetly devoted himself to getting over it, and had succeeded decently well; and last, but not least, I would add that it would be decidedly difficult to make him uncomfortable again." Tredennis found it impossible to avoid watching her with grave interest each time she spoke or moved. He was watching her now with a sort of aside sensibility to her bright drapery, her flashing, tinkling wrists, and her screen of peacock feathers. "She is very light," he was saying inwardly. She turned to him with a smile. "Would he strike _you_ as 'a fellow with a grief'?" she inquired. "No," he answered; "I cannot say he would." "No," she said, "that is certain enough. If you went away and never saw him again, you would remember just this of him--if you remembered him at all: that his clothes fitted him well, that he had an agreeable laugh, that he had a civil air of giving you his attention when you spoke, and--nothing else." "And that is not all there is of him?" Tredennis asked. She looked down at her feather screen, still smiling slightly. "No," she answered, rather slowly, "not quite all; but even I don't quite know how much more there is, and Richard, who has known him at intervals all his life, lapses into speaking of him as 'a fellow with a grief.'" Richard rose from his chair. "Oh," he said, with much cheerfulness, "there is no denying that you two are the outgrowth of an effete civilization. You are always arriving at logical deductions concerning each other, and you have a tendency to the derision of all the softer emotions. You are a couple of world-worn creatures, and it is left to me to represent the youth and ardor of the family." "That is true," said Bertha, in her soft, mocking voice. "We are battered and worldly wise--and we have no object." "But I have," said Richard, "and if Colonel Tredennis will come upstairs with me, I will show him what a few of them are, if he takes an interest in such things."