that time has stood still since we met last. How wonderfully well you
wear! When shall we celebrate the appearance of your first wrinkle? I am
too old; I shall never live to see it."

He took an easychair, uninvited; placed himself close at his aunt's
side, and ran his eye over her ill-chosen dress with an air of satirical
admiration. "How perfectly successful!" he said, with his well-bred
insolence. "What a chaste gayety of color!"

"What do you want?" asked her Ladyship, not in the least softened by the
compliment.

"I want to pay my respects to my dear aunt," Felix answered, perfectly
impenetrable to his ungracious reception, and perfectly comfortable in a
spacious arm-chair.

No pen-and-ink portrait need surely be drawn of Felix Sweetsir--he is
too well-known a picture in society. The little lith e man, with his
bright, restless eyes, and his long iron-gray hair falling in curls to
his shoulders, his airy step and his cordial manner; his uncertain age,
his innumerable accomplishments, and his unbounded popularity--is he not
familiar everywhere, and welcome everywhere? How gratefully he receives,
how prodigally he repays, the cordial appreciation of an admiring
world! Every man he knows is "a charming fellow." Every woman he sees
is "sweetly pretty." What picnics he gives on the banks of the Thames in
the summer season! What a well-earned little income he derives from the
whist-table! What an inestimable actor he is at private theatricals
of all sorts (weddings included)! Did you never read Sweetsir's novel,
dashed off in the intervals of curative perspiration at a German bath?
Then you don't know what brilliant fiction really is. He has never