ndary fact, and back to cover. They gave one
twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a
stretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but with
an air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociological
types. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He
never raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask
what we thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would
say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say
rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and I
would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement
of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for
some other topic of equal interest....

On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal
bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind
and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not his
wife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was
present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There was
also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of
me I cannot remember her name.

Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life
of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether
false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At
any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was
a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it
may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady
Carmixter had returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to
a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how
he had profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his power
of work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without
inconvenience.

"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.

"Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after things."

"But publicly?"

"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult
nine books!"

We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig'