Vance, more and more surprised, looked hard at Lionel without speaking. Five years of that critical age, from seventeen to twenty-two, spent in the great capital of Europe; kept from its more dangerous vices partly by a proud sense of personal dignity, partly by a temperament which, regarding love as an ideal for all tender and sublime emotion, recoiled from low profligacy as being to love what the Yahoo of the mocking satirist was to man; absorbed much by the brooding ambition that takes youth out of the frivolous present into the serious future, and seeking companionship, not with contemporary idlers, but with the highest and maturest intellects that the free commonwealth of good society brought within his reach: five years so spent had developed a boy, nursing noble dreams, into a man fit for noble action,--retaining freshest youth in its enthusiasm, its elevation of sentiment, its daring, its energy, and divine credulity in its own unexhausted resources; but borrowing from maturity compactness and solidity of idea,--the link between speculation and practice, the power to impress on others a sense of the superiority which has been self-elaborated by unconscious culture. "So!" said Vance, after a prolonged pause, "I don't know whether I have resolve or genius; but certainly if I have made my way to some small reputation, patience, hope, and concentration of purpose must have the credit of it; and prudence, too, which you have forgotten to name, and certainly don't evince as a charioteer. I hope, my dear fellow, you are not extravagant? No doubt, eh?--why do you laugh?" "The question is so like you, Frank,--thrifty as ever." "Do you think I could have painted with a calm mind if I knew that at my door there was a dun whom I could not pay? Art needs serenity; and if an artist begin his career with as few shirts to his back as I had, he must place economy amongst the rules of perspective." Lionel laughed again, and made some comments on economy which were certainly, if smart, rather flippant, and tended not only to lower the favourable estimate of his intellectuai improvement which Vance had just formed, but seriously disquieted the kindly artist. Vance knew the world,--knew the peculiar temptations to which a young man in Lionel's position would be exposed,--knew that contempt for economy belongs to that school of Peripatetics which reserves its last lessons for finished disciples in the sacred walks of the Queen's Bench. However, that was no auspicious moment for didactic warnings. "Here we are!" cried Lionel,--"Putney Bridge." They reached the little inn by the river-side, and while dinner was getting ready they hired a boat. Vance took the oars. VANCE.--"Not so pretty here as by those green quiet banks along which we glided, at moonlight, five years ago." LIONEL.--"Ah, no! And that innocent, charming child, whose portrait you took,--you have never heard of her since?" VANCE.--"Never! How should I? Have you?"