'Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and mental strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with a nonchalance I cannot convey: "Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while." "Why?" said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn't know—wouldn't say. But I gathered that, according to him, Elsmere is still swathed in such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags and patches he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort of the change. It seemed to me the tone of the very cool spectator, rather than the friend. However—does your sister like him?'
'I don't know,' said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the face.
Hugh Flaxman's fair complexion flushed a little. He got up to go.
He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I ever saw,' he remarked as he buttoned up his coat. 'Don't you think so?'
'Yes,' said Agnes dubiously, 'if he didn't stoop, and if he didn't in general look half-asleep.'
Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the reason for the constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti-social person at the Leyburns' house. Being himself a man of very subtle and fastidious tastes, he could imagine that so original a suitor, with such eyes, such an intellectual reputation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and the most picturesque capacity for silence, might have attractions for a romantic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose rarely talked to him, and was always ready to make him the target of a sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to him, and Mrs. Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. Elsmere, too, seemed to dislike him, and yet there he was, week after week. Flaxman could not make it out.
Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started various topics with him—University reform, politics, music. In vain. In his most characteristic Oxford days Langham had never assumed a more wholesale ignorance of all subjects in heaven and earth, and never stuck more pertinaciously to the flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked away at last boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom.
However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of these fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly home in a state of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the pockets of his overcoat.
'No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything your own way so easily with me or with her! You may break me, but you shall not play upon me. And as for her, I will see it out—I will see it out!'
And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all about him, and a strange new force tingling in every vein.