the Absolute and the Unconditioned, or bore her by talking about
Aristotle's Politics, or the revolutions in Corcyra. For you know,
my dear Le Breton, if you HAVE a fault, it is that you're such a
consummate and irrepressible prig; now aren't you really?'

'I'm hardly a fair judge on that subject, I suppose, Berkeley; but
if YOU have a rudimentary glimmering of a virtue, it is that you're
such a deliciously frank and yet considerate critic. I'll pocket
your rudeness though, and eat your lunch, in spite of it. Is Miss
Butterfly, as you call her, as stand-off as her brother?'

'Not at all. She's accueillante to the last degree.'

'Very restricted, I suppose--a country girl of the first water?
Horizon absolutely bounded by the high hedges of her native parish?'

'Oh dear no! Anything but that. She's like her brother, naturally
quick and adaptive.'

'Oswald's an excellent fellow in his way,' said Herbert, button-holing
his own waistcoat; 'but he's spoilt by two bad traits. In the first
place, he's so dreadfully conscious of the fact that he has risen
from a lower position; and then, again, he's so engrossingly and
pervadingly mathematical. X square seems to have seized upon him
bodily, and to have wormed its fatal way into his very marrow.'

'Ah, you must remember, he's true to his first love. Culture came
to him first, while yet he abode in Philistia, under the playful
disguise of a conic section. He scaled his way out of Gath by means
of a treatise on elementary trigonometry, and evaded Askelon on