There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much overdone nowadays.  After all, what does it matter—­that Fanny Elmer was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother’s influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongers said, she had a spark of her mother’s spirit in her—­was somehow heroic.  But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant!  Simple to a degree, others thought her.  And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts Dick Bonamy—­the young man with the Wellington nose.  Now he’s a dark horse if you like.  And there these gossips would suddenly pause.  Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition—­long rumoured among them.

“But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that temperament need...”  Miss Julia Eliot would hint.

“Well,” Mr. Bowley would reply, “it may be so.”

For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their victims’ characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.

“That young man, Jacob Flanders,” they would say, “so distinguished looking—­and yet so awkward.”  Then they would apply themselves to Jacob and vacillate eternally between the two extremes.  He rode to hounds—­ after a fashion, for he hadn’t a penny.

“Did you ever hear who his father was?” asked Julia Eliot.

“His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,” replied Mr. Bowley.

“He doesn’t overwork himself anyhow.”

“His friends are very fond of him.”

“Dick Bonamy, you mean?”

“No, I didn’t mean that.  It’s evidently the other way with Jacob.  He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, Mr. Bowley,” said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious manner, “you remember Mrs. Adams?  Well, that is her niece.”  And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.

So we are driven back to see what the other side means—­the men in clubs and Cabinets—­when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.

The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately apart.  At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand—­at the sixth he looks up) flames into splinters.  With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together.  Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through field glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick.