had never become one of those old men who ramble round and round the fields of reminiscence. Himself quickly fatigued by theinsensitive, he instinctively avoided fatiguing others, and his natural flirtatiousness towards beauty guarded him speciallyin his relations with a woman. He would have liked to draw her out, but though she murmured and smiled and seemed to beenjoying what he told her, he remained conscious of that mysterious remoteness which constituted half her fascination. Hecould not bear women who threw their shoulders and eyes at you, and chattered away; or hard-mouthed women who laid down thelaw and knew more than you did. There was only one quality in a woman that appealed to him — charm; and the quieter it was,the more he liked it. And this one had charm, shadowy as afternoon sunlight on those Italian hills and valleys he had loved.The feeling, too, that she was, as it were, apart, cloistered, made her seem nearer to himself, a strangely desirablecompanion. When a man is very old and quite out of the running, he loves to feel secure from the rivalries of youth, for hewould still be first in the heart of beauty. And he drank his hock, and watched her lips, and felt nearly young. But the dogBalthasar lay watching her lips too, and despising in his heart the interruptions of their talk, and the tilting of thosegreenish glasses full of a golden fluid which was distasteful to him.

The light was just failing when they went back into the music-room. And, cigar in mouth, old Jolyon said:

“Play me some Chopin.”

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men’s souls. Old Jolyon could notbear a strong cigar or Wagner’s music. He loved Beethoven and Mozart, Handel and Gluck, and Schumann, and, for some occultreason, the operas of Meyerbeer; but of late years he had been seduced by Chopin, just as in painting he had succumbed toBotticelli. In yielding to these tastes he had been conscious of divergence from the standard of the Golden Age. Their