Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he was doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist, impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things.  Our Optimy has his instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy’s countenance at the confession of a dilemma-foreseen!  He hands himself to Pessimy, as it were a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack with the wood.  But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no compensation:  Pessimy is invulnerable.  You waste your time in hurling a common ‘tu-quoque’ at one who hugs the worst.

The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view, and neutral view of life, were a comical trio.  They had come upon the days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London’s early August when it is not pipeing March.  Victor complacently bore heat as well as cold:  but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it; and why was he stewing in London?  It was for this young Dudley, who resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale water:  or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London’s professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told:  Why was not Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture!  They ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol.  Nesta had of late been turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she and Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath had filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it as victim on St. Helena’s rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua’s fortress-walls blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes for his pathetic sublime.

Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of his darlings.  But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious pictures of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth from the London oven:—­lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks and snow lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it shooting aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and wide-armed in its pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in immobility, to the heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to crowned victory.  And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows and maize, and lower vineyards and central tall green spires!  Walking beside young Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the trips and twists of a rill, that was lured a little further down through scoops, ducts, and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.