s his Grace
there, or the noble Marquis. There's no commotion, no stir when you
enter the room. The men at their newspapers look up, perhaps, but they
read away immediately with only increased attention; the group at the
window talks on too; the only thing noticeable is that nobody talks to
_you_. If you ask for the 'Globe' or the 'Chronicle,' when the reader
shall have finished, he politely hands it at once, and goes away."

"If he did, I'd follow him--"

"What for?--to ask an explanation where there had been no offence?
To make yourself at once notorious in the worst of all possible ways?
There's nothing so universally detested as the man that makes a 'row;'
witness the horror all well-bred people feel at associating with
Americans, they're never sure how it's to end. Now, if all these
considerations have their weight with men, imagine how they mast be
regarded by women, fifty times more exacting as they are in all the
exigencies of station, and whose freemasonry is a hundred times more
exclusive."

"That's all rot!" broke in Davis, his passion the more violent as the
arguments of the other seemed so difficult to answer. "You think to
puzzle _me_ by talking of all these grand people and their ways as if
they weren't all men and women. That they are, and a rum lot, too, some
of them! Come," cried Davis, suddenly, as though a happy thought had
just flashed across his mind, "it was the turn of a straw one day, by
your own account, that you were not a bishop. Now, I 'd like to know, if
that lucky event had really taken place, wouldn't you have been the same
Holy Paul Classon that sits there?"

"Perhaps not, entirely," said Classon, in his oiliest of voices. "I
trust that I should, in ascending to that exalted station, have cast off
the slough of an inferior existence, and carried up little of my former
self except the friendships of my early years."

"Do you fancy, Master Paul, that gammon like this can impose upon a man
of my sort?"

"My dear and worthy friend," rejoined Classon, "the tone in which I
appeal to you is my tribute to your high ability. To an inferior man
I had spoken very different language. Sentiments are not the less
real that they are expressed with a certain embroidery, just as a Bank
post-bill would be very good value though a Choctaw Indian might deem it
a piece of waste-paper."

"I 'd like to see you try it on with Lizzy in this fashion," said Davis.
"I don't think even your friend the Choct