society,--eh?"

"Certainly! he has been more courted than most young men, and perhaps
more talked of. Oddities generally are."

"You own he has talents above the average? Do you not think he will
make a figure in the world some day, and discharge that debt to the
literary stores or the political interests of his country, which alas,
I and my predecessors, the other Sir Peters, failed to do; and for
which I hailed his birth, and gave him the name of Kenelm?"

"Upon my word," answered Mivers,--who had now finished his breakfast,
retreated to an easy-chair, and taken from the chimney-piece one of
his famous trabucos,--"upon my word, I can't guess; if some great
reverse of fortune befell him, and he had to work for his livelihood,
or if some other direful calamity gave a shock to his nervous system
and jolted it into a fussy, fidgety direction, I dare say he might
make a splash in that current of life which bears men on to the grave.
But you see he wants, as he himself very truly says, the two
stimulants to definite action,--poverty and vanity."

"Surely there have been great men who were neither poor nor vain?"

"I doubt it. But vanity is a ruling motive that takes many forms and
many aliases: call it ambition, call it love of fame, still its
substance is the same,--the desire of applause carried into fussiness
of action."

"There may be the desire for abstract truth without care for
applause."