These contradictions that I speak of ran through his whole nature, and they were perfectly apparent in his habits, in his manners, in his conversation, and even in his person. It was as if the souls of two very different men had been thrown together in the same mould and they had agreed, for convenience sake, to use the very vulgar phrase of the day, to run the machine in alternation. The machine with Benvolio was always the imagination; but in his different moods it kept a very different tune. To an acute observer his face itself would have betrayed these variations; and it is certain that his dress, his talk, his way of spending his time, one day and another, abundantly indicated them. Sometimes he looked very young—rosy, radiant, blooming, younger than his years. Then suddenly, as the light struck his head in a particular manner, you would see that his golden locks contained a surprising number of silver threads; and with your attention quickened by this discovery, you would proceed to detect something grave and discreet in his smile—something vague and ghostly, like the dim adumbration of the darker half of the lunar disk. You might have met Benvolio, in certain moods, dressed like a man of the highest fashion—wearing his hat on his ear, a rose in his buttonhole, a wonderful intaglio or an antique Syracusan coin, by way of a pin, in his cravat. Then, on the mor-
