the malignity of age.  But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe.  It requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the young.  The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment—­if you had not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal affair—­a hyphen, a trait d’union,[45] between you and your censor; age’s philandering, for her pleasure and your good.  Incontestably the young man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio,[46] sick with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile.  The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye.  If a man were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment.  But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty.  Still there are some—­and I doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment.

The class of men represented by Vernon Whitford in The Egoist,[47] says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly.  Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully considers “its astonishing dryness.”  He is the best of men, but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.  Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of their position in life.  They can retire into the fortified camp of the proprieties.  They can touch a subject and suppress it.  The most adroit employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they wear gloves when they shake hands.  But a man has the full responsibility of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of Vernon Whitford.