e fight between business and honour. If we do not fight
for honour, who will? What other right have we poor two-legged sinners
to titles and quartered shields except that we staggeringly support some
idea of giving things which cannot be demanded and avoiding things which
cannot be punished? Our only claim is to be a wall across Christendom
against the Jew pedlars and pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins and
the--"

The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets.

"Oh, I say," he said, "you've been readin' Lloyd George. Nobody but
dirty Radicals can say a word against Goldstein."

"I certainly cannot permit," said the elder Duke, rising rather shakily,
"the respected name of Lord Goldstein--"

He intended to be impressive, but there was something in the Frenchman's
eye that is not so easily impressed; there shone there that steel which
is the mind of France.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I think I have all the details now. You have
ruled England for four hundred years. By your own account you have not
made the countryside endurable to men. By your own account you have
helped the victory of vulgarity and smoke. And by your own account you
are hand and glove with those very money-grubbers and adventurers whom
gentlemen have no other business but to keep at bay. I do not know what
your people will do; but my people would kill you."

Some seconds afterwards he had left the Duke's house, and some hours
afterwards the Duke's estate.

The Glory of Grey

I suppose that, taking this summer as a whole, people will not call it
an appropriate time for praising the English climate. But for my part I
will praise the English climate till I die--even if I die of the English
climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real
sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you
have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds;
in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America
you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes
varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal
scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair. Only in our own
romantic country do you have the strictly romantic thing called Weather;
beautiful and changing as a woman. The great English landscape painters
(neglected now like everything that is English) have this salient
distinction: that the Weather is not t