Thus he hugged himself in deliciously wilful ignorance of his own shortcomings, and shut his ears to the whispered reproaches of musical conscience.  Had he been married his wife would no doubt have lost no time in enlightening him,—­she would have told him he was a wretched player, that his scrapings on the ’cello were enough to drive one mad, and sundry other assurances of the perfectly conjugal type of frankness,—­but as it chanced he was a happy bachelor, a free and independent man with more than sufficient means to gratify his particular tastes and whims.  He was partner in a steadily prosperous banking concern, and had just enough to do to keep him pleasantly and profitably occupied.  Asked why he did not marry, he replied with blunt and almost brutal honesty, that he had never yet met a woman whose conversation he could stand for more than an hour.

“Silly or clever,” he said, “they are all possessed of the same infinite tedium.  Either they say nothing, or they say everything; they are always at the two extremes, and announce themselves as dunces or blue-stockings.  One wants the just medium,—­the dainty commingling of simplicity and wisdom that shall yet be pure womanly,—­and this is precisely the jewel ‘far above rubies’ that one cannot find.  I’ve given up the search long ago, and am entirely resigned to my lot.  I like women very well—­I may say very much—­as friends, but to take one on chance as a comrade for life! ...  No, thank you!”

Such was his fixed opinion and consequent rejection of matrimony; and for the rest, he studied art and literature and became an authority on both; so much so that on one occasion he kept a goodly number of people away from visiting the Royal Academy Exhibition, he having voted it a “disgrace to Art.”

“English artists occupy the last grade in the whole school of painting,” he had said indignantly, with that decisive manner of his which somehow or other carried conviction, . .  “The very Dutch surpass them; and instead of trying to raise their standard, each year sees them grovelling in lower depths.  The Academy is becoming a mere gallery of portraits, painted to please the caprices of vain men and women, at a thousand or two thousand guineas apiece; ugly portraits, too, woodeny portraits, utterly uninteresting portraits of prosaic nobodies.  Who cares to see ’No. 154.  Mrs. Flummery in her presentation-dress’.. except Mrs. Flummery’s own particular friends? ... or ’283.  Miss Smox, eldest daughter of Professor A. T. Smox,’ or ‘516.  Baines Bryce, Esq.’? ...  Who is Baines Bryce? ...  Nobody ever heard of him before.  He may be a retired pork-butcher for all any one knows!  Portraits, even of celebrities, are a mistake.  Take Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, the man who, when left to himself, writes some of the grandest lines in the English language, he had his portrait in the Academy, and everybody ran away from it, it was such an unutterable hideous