"Just so; and of course you were ready to tumble into any sort of scrape. You are hauled over the coals--snubbed for your pains?"
"Of course: they'll soon work the enthusiasm out of you. But that's a couple of years ago--and you weren't recalled?"
"Why--don't you see?--my time is out--and they've dropped me down. My whole career is closed--I'm quietly thrown over--and I'm only twenty-nine!" The young man caught at his moustache with nervous hands and kicked with one foot against the rails of the balcony. He gazed into the street, and his eyes sparkled and twinkled as if there were tears in them. Perhaps there were, for Mr. Heron was evidently a young man of quicker emotions than young men generally show in our days. He made haste to say something, apparently as if to escape from himself.
"Then why don't you go to bed and have a sleep?"
"Well, I don't feel like sleeping just yet."
"You young fellows never know the blessing of sleep. I can sleep whenever I want to--it's a great thing. I make it a rule though to do all my sleeping at night, whenever I can. You leave Paris in the morning? Now that's a thing I don't like to do. Paris should never be seen early in the morning. London shows to the best advantage early; but Paris--no!"
"Why not?" Mr. Heron asked, stimulated to a little curiosity.
"Paris is a beauty, you know, a little on the wane, and wanting to be elaborately made up and curled and powdered and painted, and all that. She's a little of a slattern underneath the surface, you know, and doesn't bear to be taken unawares--mustn't be seen for at least an hour or two after she has got out of bed. All the more like Balzac's women."
Perhaps the elder man had observed Mr. Heron's sensitiveness more closely and clearly than Heron fancied, and was talking on only to give him time to recover his composure. Certainly he talked much more volubly and continuously than appeared at first to be his way. After a while he said, in his usual style of blunt but not unkind inquiry--
"No--in fact, I haven't any people in England--few relations now left anywhere."
"Like Melchisedek, eh? Well, I don't know that he was the most to be pitied of men. You have friends enough, I suppose?"
"Not friends exactly--acquaintances enough, I dare say--people to call on, people who remember one's name and who ask one to dinner. But I don't know that I shall have much time for cultivating acquaintanceships in the way of society."