"Oh! on my discovery?"
"Yes. It occurs to me that I have met with it before somewhere."
Cecil said this by way of cutting short the discussion, perfectly aware that Vyner was too much of a commentator to care one straw about an opinion, unless he were the originator.
"Impossible! Im-poss-ible!" ejaculated Vyner, much in the strain that Dominie Sampson may have ejaculated 'prodigious!'
"It's very ingenious," said Cecil, who did not know a word about it, "very; and true."
"Yes, yes, but you think it is not original? Its originality is everything with me."
"Perhaps as some compromise between your theory and the ordinary one, you might say that the orius amnis and the Adonic termination generally is only a termination, not a new verse."
"Compromise!" exclaimed the astonished Vyner, "why that is my theory!"
Cecil was posed. Convicted of such palpable inattention as to have suggested as an improvement the very idea which had just been explained to him, he could but stutter out some incoherent phrases of excuse.
Vyner was doubly hurt. The inattention was one offence, but that was nothing to the careless way in which Cecil had proposed as an indifferent modification the grand discovery he, Vyner, had made, which was to immortalize him. With an air of quiet dignity, which Cecil had never seen before, the offended philologist assuring him he was not ripe yet for such subjects, which could scarcely be a matter of surprise at his age, he bowed him out.