she possessed to bow down to and worship? And
how many of us are there who prostrate
themselves every day to stocks and stones, and think
them gods?

Edgar Greyfaunt was eminently handsome.
They were all there: the trappings, and gewgaws,
and flounces, and furbelows of man's comeliness
that drive silly women out of their wits. He
was tall and shapely, and his nose was aquiline,
and his teeth were white. His hands and feet
were small, and his auburn hair curled in rich
luxuriance over his broad white forehead.
Nature had provided him with every luxury. All
the accessories and addenda of beauty he
possessed. None of the trifling adjuncts, the
absence of which the cunning eye of a woman
quickly detects, were absent. The slight
moustache he wore became him infinitely. There was
a touch of softness in his smile to relieve its
impudence. There were silken eyelashes to veil
his bold glance. There was a dash of music in
his loud clear voice. There was strength as
well as elegance in his limbs. Women like a
Narcissus grafted on the Colossus of Rhodes.
The middlingly handsome man has no chance
with them. To succeed, you must be either a
model of manly and athletic beauty, or else as
ugly as Jack Wilkes or Gabriel de Mirabeau,
and with the serpent or the devil's tongue. And
sometimes squinting Wilkes and pock-pitted
Mirabeau are more successful than Adonis the
Life Guardsman and Autinous the muscular
heathen.

They went in to dinner, and the prodigal grand-
nephew was feasted. Lily kept her eyes
consistently on her plate from the potage to the dessert,
yet for all that she was perfectly well aware that
his highness the grand-nephew's gaze was seldom
away from her face. Madame de Kergolay
ascribed her blushings and tremblings, her
droppings of knives and forks and napkins, to timidity.
To what other cause, indeed, could they be
ascribed?

It is needless to give an accurate report of
the table-talk. Madame de Kergolay uttered
little beyond interjections of admiration and
affection. Lily said nothing at all. As for Edgar
Greyfaunt he simply bragged; and a handsome
braggadocio has little to fear when his only two
possible interlocutors are a fond doting old
woman and a shrinking girl. He bragged about
everything in general, and himself in particular.
About the praise M. Delaroche, whose pupil he
was, had bestowed upon his study in oil from
Michael Angelo, and the chance he had of carrying
off the Grand Prize of Rome at the approaching
competition at the School of Fine Arts.
About his jokes in the studio, and his
fencing matches with his fellow-students, whom
he always vanquished. About a young painter
scarcely so old as he, who had just got the cross
of the Legion of Honor. "Everybody admits
that I am superior to him in form, in composition,
and in colour," quoth Edgar, modestly;
"but then, you see, I am such a fainéant, such a
lazy fellow. Never mind, I shall catch up young
Rapinard in a year or two."

Madame de Kergolay fondly believed that he
would, and, in her secret soul, marvelled
whatever those tasteless idiots, the Jury of the
EXposition of Paintings, could have been about, to
recommend Rapinard for the cross. It is true
that Prince Greyfaunt had never exhibited
anything. He told his great-aunt, with his easy
laugh, that Rapinard was the son of an employé
in the Pompes Funèbres—an undertaker's man;
that his mother kept a bureau de nourrices—a
servants' registry office; that he had a head like
Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, and one leg
shorter than the other. Madame de Kergolay
was only acquainted with one Quasimodo—the
duly calendared saint of that name; but, good,
charitable, Christian woman as she was, she
could scarcely help despising the bourgeois
Rapinard, the son of the croquemort. She did
not know that Rapinard rose at six every morning,
to draw from the round till nine; that he
painted all day; that he sat up half the night
poring over his Albinus, and drawing the bones
of the skeleton, and the upper and lower layers
of muscles backwards. And, had she known
that Rapinard lived chiefly on red eggs and
sous'-worths of Brie cheese; that he kept his
father the under-undertaker, who was blind, and
his mother the registry-shop keeper, who was
paralytic; and that he was accustomed to say,
"Never mind; we shall be better off when I am
a member of the Institute and an officer of the
Legion" (and Rapinard, I rejoice to say, is both,
at this present writing); had Madame la
Baronne been reminded of these trifling things,
her opinion concerning Rapinard would have
changed, I warrant, to a surprising degree.

But there was no end to the Sultan
Greyfaunt's bragging. He condescended to bestow a
long evening on his aged relative, and, when he
was tired of bragging about art, he gave fashion
a turn. With vain-glorious loquacity, he dwelt
upon the grand houses to which he had been
invited during his sketching tour; "for,
although," he remarked, apologetically, "I mean
to be a historical painter, one mustn't lose sight
of the value of landscapes in backgrounds."
His talk was of dukes and counts, of presidents
of the chamber, and keepers of the seals. When
his grand-aunt asked after the bearer of some
memorable name, some waif and stray of the
great revolutionary shipwreck, he laughed.

"Ask me after the Doge of Venice. All these
people are as rococo as Vieux Sablons yonder,
and are sensibly hidden away in the Marais like
rats in a hole. Now and then, I cross the river
to the Rue de Lille or de Bourgogne, and look
up the respectable antiquities left high and dry
by the receding tide. Do you know, my aunt,
there are still people who believe in the most
Christian King Charles the Tenth, and speak
of that little boy over yonder as Henry the
Fifth?"

"And you, my nephew," the old lady, in mild