Roland stopped. He was gazing in surprise at someone standing near: a man nearly his own age, tall and strong, and bearing altogether a general resemblance to himself. But the other's face had a cynical cast, expressive of ill-nature, and the lips were disagreeably full. Roland recognized him for his brother, although they had not met for more than seven years.
"That's Gerald, if ever I saw him in my life."
"Yes, it is Gerald," said Miss Channing, quietly. "He generally comes to Mrs. Bede's soirées."
"Isn't he got up!"
Roland's expression was an apt one. Gerald Yorke was in the very pink of male fashion. His manners were easy; entirely those of a man at home in society.
"He does it grand, does he not?" cried Roland, who had made one advance towards making friends with his brother since coming to London, and was not responded to in kind.
Miss Channing laughed. Gerald Yorke had entered on some kind of public career and was very prosperous, she believed, moving amidst the great ones of the land. Roland, quite forgetting where he was, or perhaps not caring, set up a whistle by way of attracting the attention of Gerald, who turned amidst others at the strange sound.
"How d'ye do, Gerald, old boy? Come and shake hands."
The voice was loud, glad, hearty; the great hand, with its great white glove drawn up over it, minus a button, was stretched above intervening heads. Gerald Yorke's face grew dark with the light of annoyance, and he hesitated before making the best of the situation, and getting near enough to shake the offered hand.
He would far rather have become conveniently deaf, and walked off in an opposite direction. Alike though the brothers were in general personal resemblance, no contrast could be greater than they presented in other respects. Gerald, fine and fashionable, with his aristocratic air and his slow, affected drawl, was the very type of all that is false of that insincerity and heartlessness obtaining in what is called society. Roland, hot, thoughtless, never weighing a word before he spoke it, impulsive, genuine, utterly unsophisticated as to the usages and manners that go to make up the meetings of fashionable life, was just as single-hearted and true.