Who knows? If he really has a noble elevated superior mind--though not a
Cavalier in person, he may be one at heart--he might, to please you, and
since you put such stress upon it, abstain...perhaps with some loss of
dignity, but never mind. And the request might be singular, or seem so,
but everything has happened before in this world, you know, my dear boy.
And what an infinite consolation it is for the eccentric, that
reflection!"

The hero was impervious to the wise youth. He stared at him as if he
were but a speck in the universe he visioned.

It was provoking that Richard should be Adrian's best subject for cynical
pastime, in the extraordinary heterodoxies he started, and his worst in
the way he took it; and the wise youth, against his will, had to feel as
conscious of the young man's imaginative mental armour, as he was of his
muscular physical.

"The same sort of day!" mused Richard, looking up. "I suppose my
father's right. We make our own fates, and nature has nothing to do with
it."

Adrian yawned.

"Some difference in the trees, though," Richard continued abstractedly.

"Growing bald at the top," said Adrian.

"Will you believe that my aunt Helen compared the conduct of that
wretched slave Clare to Lucy's, who, she had the cruel insolence to say,
entangled me into marriage?" the hero broke out loudly and rapidly. "You