sort of women, aren't they?' the squire
questioned him, 'with tow hair and fish eyes, high o' the shoulder, bony,
and a towel skin and gone teeth, so I've heard tell. I've heard that's
why the men have all taken to their beastly smoking.'

Peterborough ejaculated: 'Indeed! sir, really!' He assured my aunt that
German ladies were most agreeable, cultivated persons, extremely
domesticated, retiring; the encomiums of the Roman historian were as well
deserved by them in the present day as they had been in the past;
decidedly, on the whole, Peterborough would call them a virtuous race.

'Why do they let the men smoke, then?' said the squire. 'A pretty style
o' courtship. Come, sit by my hearth, ma'am; I 'll be your
chimney--faugh! dirty rascals!'

Janet said: 'I rather like the smell of cigars.'

'Like what you please, my dear--he'll be a lucky dog,' the squire
approved her promptly, and asked me if I smoked.

I was not a stranger to the act, I confessed.

'Well'--he took refuge in practical philosophy--'a man must bring some
dirt home from every journey: only don't smoke me out, mercy's sake.'

Here was a hint of Janet's influence with him, and of what he expected
from my return to Riversley.

Peterborough informed me that he suffered persecution over the last
glasses of Port in the evening, through the squire's persistent inquiries
as to whether a woman had anything to do with my staying so long abroad.
'A lady, sir?' quoth Peterborough. 'Lady, if you like,' rejoined the
squire. 'You parsons and petticoats must always mince the meat to hash
the fact.' Peterborough defended his young friend Harry's moral
reputation, and was amazed to hear that the squire did not think highly
of a man's chastity. The squire acutely chagrined the sensitive gentleman
by drawling the word after him, and declaring that he tossed that kind of
thing into the women's wash-basket. Peterborough, not without signs of
indignation, protesting, the squire asked him point-blank if he supposed
that Old England had been raised to the head of the world by such as he.
In fine, he favoured Peterborough with a lesson in worldly views. 'But
these,' Peterborough said to me, 'are not the views, dear Harry--if they
are the views of ladies of any description, which I take leave to
doubt--not the views of the ladies you and I would esteem. For instance,
the ladies of this household.' My aunt Dorothy's fate was plain.

In reply to my grandfather's renewed dem