opportunity to show that I could both feel and communicate the
pleasure of social intercourse--that I was not, in short, a
block, or a piece of furniture, but an acting, thinking, sentient
man. Many smiling faces and graceful figures glided past me, but
the smiles were lavished on other eyes, the figures sustained by
other hands than mine. I turned away tantalized, left the
dancers, and wandered into the oak-panelled dining-room. No fibre
of sympathy united me to any living thing in this house; I looked
for and found my mother's picture. I took a wax taper from a
stand, and held it up. I gazed long, earnestly; my heart grew to
the image. My mother, I perceived, had bequeathed to me much of
her features and countenance--her forehead, her eyes, her
complexion. No regular beauty pleases egotistical human beings
so much as a softened and refined likeness of themselves; for
this reason, fathers regard with complacency the lineaments of
their daughters' faces, where frequently their own similitude is
found flatteringly associated with softness of hue and delicacy
of outline. I was just wondering how that picture, to me so
interesting, would strike an impartial spectator, when a voice
close behind me pronounced the words--

"Humph! there's some sense in that face."

I turned; at my elbow stood a tall man, young, though probably
five or six years older than I--in other respects of an
appearance the opposite to common place; though just now, as I am
not disposed to paint his portrait in detail, the reader must be
content with the silhouette I have just thrown off; it was all I
myself saw of him for the moment: I did not investigate the
colour of his eyebrows, nor of his eyes either; I saw his