The young man was, indeed, his uncle’s very antithesis—his butt, his foil, his aggravation. He, the nephew, considered no doubt that he held a brief for the other side (truth to oneself, we will call it); and he was never at great pains to disguise his contempt of a certain order of licence. Cold, dry, austere, he had yet that observant faculty that, conceiving of circumstance, may fall pregnant with either justice or inhumanity. At present, from the height of his twenty-five years, he looked with a tolerant serenity into the arena of struggling passions.
“This is all vastly foolish,” was his superior reflection. “Am I destined to make a practice of turning my thumb up or down?”
Now, on a certain day of ’88, he walked into the house in Cavendish Square and joined his unvenerable elder on the balcony.
“Give me the parasol, Jepps,” said he. “I will hold it over Lord Murk’s head.”
The man obeyed, and withdrew. The uncle turned himself about, with a little feint of protest.
“Well,” he said resignedly, “your chacolate makes a pretty foil to my azure; and if you must dress like an attorney’s clerk, you hev at least the unspeakable satisfaction of posing as background to a gentleman.”
His glasses dangled from his neck by a broad black ribbon. He lifted them as he spoke, and conned a passing face.
“Egad!” said he, involuntarily extending his left hand as if to deprecate interruption, “what a form! What a ravishing and seductive elegance! Strake me, Ned, but if thou wert other than a bran-stuffed jackalent, I’d send thee thither to canvass for me.”
He scratched his chin testily with one from several little cocked-hat notes that lay on a chair at his side. His fingers were steeped to the knuckles in gems; his cheeks, plastered with chalk and rouge, looked in texture like the dinted covering of honeycomb. Now and again he would shoot at his young relative a covert glance of extreme dislike.
“Rat thee, Ned!” he exclaimed suddenly; “thou hast a devilish face!”