第18章

"If it is me you mean," said Zoe stiffly, _"really_ I am _surprised._ You forget we are at daggers drawn.""No, I don't, dear; and parted forever."

Zoe smiled at that against her will.

"Zoe!" (penitentially).

"Frances!" (archly).

"Come cuddle me quick!"

Zoe was all round her neck in a moment, like a lace scarf, and there was violent kissing, with a tear or two.

Then they put an arm round each other's waist, and went all about the premises intertwined like snakes; and Zoe gave Fanny her cameo brooch, the one with the pearls round it.

The person to whom Vizard fled from the tongue of beauty was a delightful talker: he read two or three newspapers every day, and recollected the best things. Now, it is not everybody can remember a thousand disconnected facts and recall them apropos. He was various, fluent, and, above all, superficial; and such are your best conversers. They have something good and strictly ephemeral to say on everything, and don't know enough of anything to impale their hearers. In my youth there talked in Pall Mall a gentleman known as "Conversation Sharpe." He eclipsed everybody. Even Macaulay paled. Sharpe talked all the blessed afternoon, and grave men listened, enchanted; and, of all he said, nothing stuck.

Where be now your Sharpiana? The learned may be compared to mines. These desultory charmers are more like the ornamental cottage near Staines, forty or fifty rooms, and the whole structure one story high. The mine teems with solid wealth; but you must grope and trouble to come to it: it is easier and pleasanter to run about the cottage with a lot of rooms.

all on the ground-floor.

The mind and body both get into habits--sometimes apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We _sit_ at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing or walking, we love to take brains easy. If this delightful chatterbox had been taken down shorthand and printed, and Vizard had been set down to Severni Opuscula, ten volumes-- and, mind you, Severne had talked all ten by this time--the Barfordshire squire and old Oxonian would have cried out for "more matter with less art," and perhaps have even fled for relief to some shorter treatise--Bacon's "Essays," Browne's "Religio Medici," or Buckle's "Civilization." But lounging in a balcony, and lazily breathing a cloud, he could have listened all day to his desultory, delightful friend, overflowing with little questions, little answers, little queries, little epigrams, little maxims _'a la Rochefoucauld,_ little histories, little anecdotes, little gossip, and little snapshots at every feather flying.

"Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago Severni."But, alas! after an hour of touch-and-go, of superficiality and soft delight, the desultory charmer fell on a subject he had studied. So then he bored his companion for the first time in all the tour.

But, to tell the honest truth, Mr. Severne had hitherto been pleasing his friend with a cold-blooded purpose. His preliminary gossip, that made the time fly so agreeably, was intended to oil the way to lubricate the passage of a premeditated pill. As soon as he had got Vizard into perfect good humor, he said, apropos of nothing that had passed, "By-the-by, old fellow, that five hundred pounds you promised to lend me!"Vizard was startled by this sudden turn of a conversation, hitherto agreeable.

"Why, you have had three hundred and lost it," said he. "Now, take my advice, and don't lose any more.""I don't mean to. But I am determined to win back the three hundred, and a great deal more, before I leave this. I have discovered a system, an infallible one.""I am sorry to hear it," said Harrington, gravely. "That is the second step on the road to ruin; the gambler with a system is the confirmed maniac.""What! because _other_ systems have been tried, and proved to be false?

Mine is untried, and it is mere prejudice to condemn it unheard.""Propound it, then," said Vizard. "Only please observe the bank has got its system; you forget that: and the bank's system is to take a positive advantage, which must win in the long run; therefore, all counter-systems must lose in the long run.""But the bank is tied to a long run, the individual player is not."This reply checked Vizard for a moment and the other followed up his advantage. "Now, Vizard, be reasonable. What would the trifling advantage the bank derives from an incident, which occurs only once in twenty-eight deals, avail against a player who could foresee at any given deal whether the card that was going to come up the nearest thirty would be on the red or black?""No avail at all. God Almighty could break the bank every afternoon.

_Apre's?_ as we say in France. Do you pretend to omniscience?""Not exactly."

"Well, but prescience of isolated events, preceded by no _indicia,_belongs only to omniscience. Did they not teach you that much at Oxford?""They taught me very little at Oxford."