Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed with Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to Dudley’s.  Latterly the bitter had become a tonic.  We rejoice in the presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses.  Dudley drove him to Colney for relief.  Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley to critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul.  That quieted her.  And another thing, she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a tuning-fork for the wild airs he started.  A little pessimism, also, she seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having to share, high flights.  And she was, in her queer woman’s way, always reassured by his endurance of Colney’s company:—­she read it to mean, that he could bear Colney’s perusal of him, and satiric stings.  Victor had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young Dudley within him, he felt them.  Preferring Fenellan’s easy humour to Colney’s acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter’s antidote to Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of their society.  They might have headed those tribes in the country.  At a period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants to be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not performance, of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their temperaments.  Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the Nineteenth Century:  the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to vitality.  Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved for a small stipend in the City of his affection, and the latter entered on an inheritance counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed for scholarship from the forlornest of seats in the Courts.  They had foretold of one another each the unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as the child of his prediction.  Victor was to have been ruined long back; Colney the prey of independent bachelors.  Colney had escaped his harpy, and Victor could be called a millionaire and more.  Prophesy was crowned by Colney’s dyspepsia, by Victor’s ticklish domestic position.  Their pity for one another, their warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of different temperaments; and we have to distinguish, that in many estimable and some gifted human creatures, it is the quality of the blood which directs the current of opinion.