"Explain," Arkwright said, laughing; "I know you won't be happy until
you have."

"Why--it's the Duchess, the Duchess, the Duchess all the time. She's the
centre of the picture; she _is_ the picture. _She's_ the subject."

Arkwright said nothing. Brun tossed his hands in the air.

"Oh--you English! No wonder you're centuries behind everything--you miss
the very things under your nose. There's the Duchess, sitting there--a
great figure as she has been these sixty years, but a figure hidden,
veiled. There she has been for the last thirty years, shut up in that
great house, wrapped about and concealed. Nobody knows what the matter
was--I don't know. I should think Christopher's the only man who can
tell. At any rate, thirty years ago she retired altogether from the
world, and sees only the fewest of people. But all the ceremony goes on,
dressing up, receiving, and the influence she has! She was powerful
enough before she disappeared, but since! Why, there's no pie she hasn't
her finger in: politics, society, revolution, life, death; nothing goes
on without her knowledge, her approval, her disapproval----"

"Her family, poor dears!"

"Oh; they love it--at any rate, the ones who are left do. The rebels are
the younger generation. Society in England, my dear Arkwright, is
dissolved into three divisions--the Autocrats, the Aristocrats, and the
Democrats. I take my hat off to the Aristocrats--the Chichesters, the
Medleys, the Darrants, the Weddons. All those quiet, decorous people,
poor as mice many of them, standing aside altogether from any movements
or war-cries of the day, living in their quiet little houses, or their
empty big ones, clever some of them, charitable all of them, but never
asserting their position or estimating it. They never look about them
and see where they are. They've no need to. They're just there.

"The Democrats are quite a new development--not much of them at
present--the Ruddards, the Denisons, the Oaks--but we shall hear a lot
of them in the future, I'm sure. They'll sacrifice anything for
cleverness; they must be amused; life must be entertaining. They embrace
everybody: actors, Americans, writers; they're quite clever, mind you,
and it's all perfectly genuine. They're not snobs--they say, 'Here are
our lands and our titles. You're common and vulgar, but you've got
brains--you're amusing and we're well born--let's make an exchange. Life
must be fun for us, so we'll have anyone with money