But Maltboy stopped sitting for portraits when he reached the
age of twenty, deciding, as many another public character has done, to
transmit only the earlier and more ethereal representations of himself
to posterity.
By some compensating law of Nature, there were given to Maltboy a light
and cheerful heart, a tendency to laugh on the smallest provocation, and
a nice susceptibility to the beautiful. Not the beautiful in rivers,
forests, skies, and other inanimate things, but the beautiful in woman.
And as Overtop was gifted to discover charms in material objects which
were plain in other eyes, so Maltboy possessed the wonderful faculty of
seeing beauty in female faces, where other people saw, perhaps, only a
bad nose, dull eyes, and a pinched-up mouth. This mental endowment might
have been a priceless gift to a portrait painter, who was desirous of
gratifying his sitters; but it was for Matthew Maltboy a fatal
possession. It had led him to love too many women too much at first
sight, and to shift his admiration from one dear object to another with
a suddenness and rapidity destructive to a well-ordered state
of society.
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