s of States. It was for him--as for the lilies in the great
glass house--impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings
of a flower of the garden outside. Soaked in the best prejudices and
manners of his class, he lived a life no more shut off from the general
than was to be expected. Indeed, in some sort, as a man of facts and
common sense, he was fairly in touch with the opinion of the average
citizen. He was quite genuine when he said that he believed he knew what
the people wanted better than those who prated on the subject; and no
doubt he was right, for temperamentally he was nearer to them than their
own leaders, though he would not perhaps have liked to be told so. His
man-of-the-world, political shrewdness had been superimposed by life on a
nature whose prime strength was its practicality and lack of imagination.
It was his business to be efficient, but not strenuous, or desirous of
pushing ideas to their logical conclusions; to be neither narrow nor
puritanical, so long as the shell of 'good form' was preserved intact; to
be a liberal landlord up to the point of not seriously damaging his
interests; to be well-disposed towards the arts until those arts revealed
that which he had not before perceived; it was his business to have light
hands, steady eyes, iron nerves, and those excellent manners that have no
mannerisms. It was his nature to be easy-going as a husband; indulgent
as a father; careful and straightforward as a politician; and as a man,
addicted to pleasure, to work, and to fresh air. He admired, and was
fond of his wife, and had never regretted his marriage. He had never
perhaps regretted anything, unless it were that he had not yet won the
Derby, or quite succeeded in getting his special strain of blue-ticked
pointers to breed absolutely true to type. His mother-in-law he
respected, as one might respect a principle.

There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the
tremendous force of accumulated decision--the inherited assurance of one
whose prestige had never been questioned; who, from long immunity, and a
certain clear-cut matter-of-factness, bred by the habit of command, had
indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be
questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of
learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-fledged
from an active dominating temperament. Fortified by the necessity, common
to her