In
person he was tall and loosely knit, with large joints and
extremities. His face was handsome and vivacious, expressing far
more than was in him to express, and giving ground for
expectation such as he had never met. He was by no means an ill-
intentioned fellow, preferred doing well and acting fairly, and
neither at school nor at college had got into any serious scrape.
But he had never found it imperative to reach out after his own
ideal of duty. He had never been worthy the name of student, or
cared much for anything beyond the amusements the universities
provide so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his
only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a
vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in
the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague
intents, never by his actions; that these had little
correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him
that they ought to correspond. In his own eyes he did well
enough, and a good deal better. Gifted not only with fluency of
speech, that crowning glory and ruin of a fool, but with
plausibility of tone and demeanor, a confidence that imposed both
on himself and on others, and a certain dropsical
impressionableness of surface which made him seem and believe
himself sympathetic, nobody could well help liking him, and it
took some time to make one accept the disappointment he caused.
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