"Who gave you those flowers, Edith?"
"Mr. Morton, sir."
"Humph!" ejaculated Leslie, with a look by no means of gratification.
Meanwhile, Morton, walking the street in an abstracted mood, overtook unawares his bachelor friend Mr. Benedick Sharpe, jurist, philosopher, and man of letters—a personage whose ordinary discourse was a singular imbroglio of irony and earnest.
"Why, Morton, what problem of ethnology are you at now? the unity of the human race, and the descent from Adam—science versus orthodoxy—is that it?"
"Nothing so deep."
"What, nothing ethnological?"
"Nothing at all."
"Ah, then I begin to tremble for you. There's but one thing else could lose you in such a maze. The flame of a candle is very pretty; but the moth that flies into it scorches his wings, poor devil."
"I am too dull to see through your metaphors."