‘I’m hardly a fair judge on that subject, I suppose, Berkeley; but if YOU have a rudimentary glimmering of a virtue, it is that you’re such a deliciously frank and yet considerate critic. I’ll pocket your rudeness though, and eat your lunch, in spite of it. Is Miss Butterfly, as you call her, as stand-off as her brother?’
‘Not at all. She’s accueillante to the last degree.’
‘Very restricted, I suppose—a country girl of the first water? Horizon absolutely bounded by the high hedges of her native parish?’
‘Oh dear no! Anything but that. She’s like her brother, naturally quick and adaptive.’
‘Oswald’s an excellent fellow in his way,’ said Herbert, button-holing his own waistcoat; ‘but he’s spoilt by two bad traits. In the first place, he’s so dreadfully conscious of the fact that he has risen from a lower position; and then, again, he’s so engrossingly and pervadingly mathematical. X square seems to have seized upon him bodily, and to have wormed its fatal way into his very marrow.’
‘Ah, you must remember, he’s true to his first love. Culture came to him first, while yet he abode in Philistia, under the playful disguise of a conic section. He scaled his way out of Gath by means of a treatise on elementary trigonometry, and evaded Askelon on the wings of an undulatory theory of light. It is different with us, you know, who have emerged from the land of darkness by the regular classical and literary highway. We feed upon Rabelais and Burton; he flits carelessly from flower to flower of the theory of Quantics. If he were an idealist painter, like Rossetti, he would paint great allegorical pictures for us, representing an asymptotic curve appearing to him in a dream, and introducing that blushing maiden, Hyperbola, to his affectionate consideration.’
As Berkeley spoke, a rap sounded on the oak, and Ernest Le Breton entered the room.
‘What, you here, Herbert?’ he said with a shade of displeasure in his tone. ‘Are you, too, of the bidden?’
‘Berkeley has asked me to stop and lunch with him, if that’s what you mean.’
‘We shall be quite a party,’ said Ernest, seating himself, and looking abstractedly round the room. ‘Why, Berkeley,’ as his eye fell upon the Venetian vase, ‘you’ve positively got some more gew-gaws here. This one’s new, isn’t it? Eh!’