'Oh yes, pardon me: I have read it. All your notes, all your addenda, show how the learning of the editor was even superior to that of the original author.'
'No; all that I could do was to simplify his immense erudition and arrange it. I never loved the work; do not accredit me with so much industry: but it was a debt that I paid, and paid easily too, for the materials lay all to my hand, if in disorder.'
'The Marquis Xavier must at least have infused his own love of archæology and science into you?'
'I can scarcely say even so much. I have a facility at acquiring knowledge, which is not a very high quality. Things come easily to me. I fear if Herr Joachim examined me he would find my science shallow.'
'You have so many talents that perhaps you are like one of your own Mexican forests; one luxuriance kills another.'
'Had I had fewer I might have been more useful in my generation,' he said, with a certain sincerity of regret.
'You would have been much less interesting,' she thought to herself, as she said aloud, 'There are the horses coming up to the steps: will you ride with me? And do not be ungrateful for your good gifts. Talent is a _Schlüsselblume_ that opens to all hidden treasures.'
'Why are you not in the Chamber?' she had said a little before to him. 'You are eloquent; you have an ancestry that binds you to do your best for France.'
'I have no convictions,' he had said, with a flush on his face. 'It is a sad thing to confess.'
'It is; but if you have nothing better to substitute for them you might be content to abide by those of your fathers.'
'Besides,' she had added, 'patriotism is not an opinion, it is an instinct.'
'Go into public life,' she had repeated. 'Convictions will come to you in an active career, as the muscles develop in the gymnasium.'
'I am indolent,' he had demurred, 'and I have desultory habits.'
'You may break yourself of these. There must be much in which you could interest yourself. Begin with the fishing interests of the coast that belongs to you.'
'Honestly, I care for nothing except for myself. You will say it is base.'
He but seldom spoke of his early life. When he did so it was with reluctance, as if it gave him pain. His father he had never known; of his grandfather, the Marquis Xavier, as he usually called him, he spoke with extreme and reverent tenderness, but with little reticence. The grave old man, in the stateliness and simplicity of his solitary life, had been to his youthful imagination a solemn and sacred figure.