Mr. Welling, he of the square person, resettled his spectacles. "As for example, Aesop? Or shall we say Socrates?"
Mr. Cannon of the white vest burbled, then coughed to cover his defection.
"The Puritan—" here ventured in Adele again, with an eye as to its being proper business on Maud, who frowned darkly, whereupon Adele, flushed but obedient again withdrew.
Tall Mr. Tate, the third of the friends of Culpepper, had looked across each time at Adele's remark twice ventured and twice withdrawn. With the exceptions of these glances in her direction, he like Mr. Wingham, had been looking at Amanthus. Even so, something of what Maud called scholastic earnestness sat upon Mr. Tate, and he was disposed, too, to treat the evening with gratifying sincerity. There was that in the subject twice introduced and twice withdrawn by the young lady in blue as he afterward designated Adele, which evidently appealed to him to the momentary eclipsing of Amanthus' charms.
"The Puritan—" he took the suggestion up the least bit sententiously and with courteous acknowledgment toward the source of its origin, "that great timely force for moral power which is moral beauty, was——"
Mr. Cannon indisputably naughty by this time, pulled down his white vest and wickedly concluded the sentence—"'was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the up-turned whites to his eyes'—how does the rest of the paragraph go, Welling?" Which was not in the least what Mr. Tate nor yet Adele had in mind to say.
But even so, was not this the mounting joy of wit? Of give and take? Of stimulation? This the hitherto imagined delight of social intercourse?
So Selina. But a hostess must keep a hostess' wit and head! Everyone must be won and led to speak! But wait, Miss Boswell, and smiling as with one lending herself prettily to the moment, is talking:
"In speaking of beauty perhaps we're thinking a bit too much of the quality in an object which in regarding it excites pleasing emotions? Surely we're to believe that the terms of beauty apply to qualities that arouse admiration and approval. I for one shall insist on there being intellectual and moral beauty—and beauty of goodness and utility. But if I understand just right, Mr. Biggs here is far better qualified to define beauty than the rest of us. And with a great poet's authority behind him, too!"