‘That will demand a little consideration now. In the fall of the year, perhaps. When the sun is less powerful the light will be more favourable to your features.’
‘My poor Dick, I cram you with good advice every day; but one counsel I never cease repeating, “Never try to be witty.” A dull fellow only cuts his finger with a joke; he never catches it by the handle. Hand me over that letter of your sister’s; I like the way she writes. All that about the pigs and the poultry is as good as the Farmer’s Chronicle.’
The other made no other reply than by coolly folding up the letter and placing it in his pocket; and then, after a pause, he said—
‘I shall tell Miss Kearney the favourable impression her epistolary powers have produced on my very clever and accomplished chum, Mr. Atlee.’
‘Do so; and say, if she’d take me for a correspondent instead of you, she’d be “exchanging with a difference.” On my oath,’ said he seriously, ‘I believe a most finished education might be effected in letter-writing. I’d engage to take a clever girl through a whole course of Latin and Greek, and a fair share of mathematics and logic, in a series of letters, and her replies would be the fairest test of her acquirement.’
‘Shall I propose this to my sister?’
‘Do so, or to your cousin. I suspect Maritana would be an apter pupil.’
‘The bell has stopped. We shall be late in the hall,’ said Kearney, throwing on his gown hurriedly and hastening away; while Atlee, taking some proof-sheets from the chimney-piece, proceeded to correct them, a slight flicker of a smile still lingering over his dark but handsome face.
Though such little jarring passages as those we have recorded were nothing uncommon between these two young men, they were very good friends on the whole, the very dissimilarity that provoked their squabbles saving them from any more serious rivalry. In reality, no two people could be less alike: Kearney being a slow, plodding, self-satisfied, dull man, of very ordinary faculties; while the other was an indolent, discursive, sharp-witted fellow, mastering whatever he addressed himself to with ease, but so enamoured of novelty that he rarely went beyond a smattering of anything. He carried away college honours apparently at will, and might, many thought, have won a fellowship with little effort; but his passion was for change. Whatever bore upon the rogueries of letters, the frauds of literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the Tuileries. He had established such relations with foreign journals that he could at any moment command insertion for a paper, now in the Mémorial Diplomatique, now in the Golos of St. Petersburg, or the Allgemeine Zeitung; while the comment, written also by himself, would appear in the Kreuz Zeitung or the Times; and the mystification became such that the shrewdest and keenest heads were constantly misled, to which side to incline in a controversy where all the wires were pulled by one hand. Many a discussion on the authenticity of a document, or the veracity of a conversation, would take place between the two young men; Kearney not having the vaguest suspicion that the author of the point in debate was then sitting opposite to him, sometimes seeming to share the very doubts and difficulties that were then puzzling himself.
While Atlee knew Kearney in every fold and fibre of his nature, Kearney had not the very vaguest conception of him with whom he sat every day at meals, and communed through almost every hour of his life. He treated Joe, indeed, with a sort of proud protection, thinking him a sharp, clever, idle fellow, who would never come to anything higher than a bookseller’s hack or an ‘occasional correspondent.’ He liked his ready speech, and his fun, but he would not consent to see in either evidences of anything beyond the amusing qualities of a very light intelligence. On the whole, he looked down upon him, as very properly the slow and ponderous people in life do look down upon their more volatile brethren, and vote them triflers. Long may it be so! There would be more sunstrokes in the world, if it were not that the shadows of dull men made such nice cool places for the others to walk in!