and agree in her general contempt of the Georges,
and foil her queries coolly, when I should have liked to perform Jorian
DeWitt's expressed wish to 'squeeze the acid out of her in one grip,
and toss her to the Gods that collect exhausted lemons.' She took
extraordinary liberties with me.

'Why not marry an Englishwoman? Rich young men ought to choose wives
from their own people, out of their own sets. Foreign women never get on
well in this country, unless they join the hounds to hunt the husband.'

She cited naturalized ladies famous for the pastime. Her world and its
outskirts she knew thoroughly, even to the fact of my grandfather's
desire that I should marry Janet Ilchester. She named a duke's daughter,
an earl's. Of course I should have to stop the scandal: otherwise the
choice I had was unrestricted. My father she evidently disliked, but
she just as much disliked an encounter with his invincible bonhomie and
dexterous tongue. She hinted at family reasons for being shy of him,
assuring me that I was not implicated in them.

'The Guelph pattern was never much to my taste,' she said, and it
consoled me with the thought that he was not ranked as an adventurer in
the houses he entered. I learned that he was supposed to depend
chiefly on my vast resources. Edbury acted the part of informant to the
inquisitive harridan: 'Her poor dear good-for-nothing Edbury! whose only
cure would be a nice, well-conducted girl, an heiress.' She had cast her
eye on Anna Penrhys, but considered her antecedents doubtful. Spotless
innocence was the sole receipt for Edbury's malady. My father, in a
fit of bold irony, proposed Lady Kane for President of his Tattle and
Scandal Club,--a club of ladies dotted with select gentlemen, the idea
of which Jorian DeWitt claimed the merit of starting, and my father
surrendered it to him, with the reservation, that Jorian intended an
association of backbiters pledged to reveal all they knew, whereas the
Club, in its present form, was an engine of morality and decency, and a
social safeguard, as well as an amusement. It comprised a Committee of
Investigation, and a Court of Appeal; its object was to arraign slander.
Lady Kane declined the honour. 'I am not a washerwoman,' she said to me,
and spoke of where dirty linen should be washed, and was distressingly
broad in her innuendoes concerning Edbury's stepmother. This Club
sat and became a terror for a month, adding something to my father's
reputation.