cannot take these subterranean excursions. I should lose my breath down
there; I should never come up alive. You know I have dropped things
down--little jokes and metaphors, little fantasies and paradoxes--and I
have never heard them touch bottom!" This was an epigram on the part
of a young man who had a lively play of fancy; but it was none the less
true that Gordon Wright had a firmly-treading, rather than a winged,
intellect. Every phrase in his letter seemed, to Bernard, to march
in stout-soled walking-boots, and nothing could better express his
attachment to the process of reasoning things out than this proposal
that his friend should come and make a chemical analysis--a geometrical
survey--of the lady of his love. "That I shall have any difficulty in
forming an opinion, and any difficulty in expressing it when formed--of
this he has as little idea as that he shall have any difficulty in
accepting it when expressed." So Bernard reflected, as he rolled in the
train to Munich. "Gordon's mind," he went on, "has no atmosphere; his
intellectual process goes on in the void. There are no currents and
eddies to affect it, no high winds nor hot suns, no changes of season
and temperature. His premises are neatly arranged, and his conclusions
are perfectly calculable."

Yet for the man on whose character he so freely exercised his wit
Bernard Longueville had a strong affection. It is nothing against
the validity of a friendship that the parties to it have not a mutual
resemblance. There must be a basis of agreement, but the structure
reared upon it may contain a thousand disparities. These two young men
had formed an alliance of old, in college days, and the bond between
them had been strengthened by the simple fact of its having survived the
sentimental revolutions of early life. Its strongest link was a sort of
mutual respect. Their tastes, their pursuits were different; but each
of them had a high esteem for the other's character. It may be said that