eighty pounds each for
their keep, and lose races with horses which cost you ten thousand a
year for their breeding and training? Do I ever say anything when you
think that people who are hungering for the whole of your land will be
either grateful or delighted because you take ten per cent. off their
rents? You know I don't. I think you ought to be allowed to ruin
yourself and accelerate the revolution in any absurd way which may seem
best to you. In return, pray let me manage my own house-parties and
choose my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. What! are you gone
away? How exactly like a man, to go away when he gets the worst of the
argument!"

Lord Usk has gone into the gardens in a towering rage. He is a
gentleman: he will quarrel with his wife all day long, but he will
always stop short of swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays in
the room a moment longer he will swear: that allusion to the Scotch
stags is too much for humanity (with a liver) to endure. When
Achnalorrie is sold to that beastly American, to be twitted with what
stags used to cost! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and the
keepers had been bores, and the crofters had been nuisances, and there
had always been some disease or other among the birds, and he had never
cared as much as some men for deer-stalking; but still, as Achnalorrie
is irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive over the bleak hills, and the
ugly house on the stony strathside, and the blinding rains, and the
driving snows, and the swelling streams which the horses had to cross as
best they could, all seem unspeakably lovely to him and the sole things
worth living for: and then his wife has the heartlessness to twit him
with the cost of each stag!

"Women have no feeling," he growls, as he walks about the gardens. "If
they think they can make a point they'll make it, let it hurt you how it
may."

He strolls down between two high yew walls with his hands in his
pockets, and feels injured and aggrieved. He ought to be a very happy
person; he is still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine
estates, fair rents, handsome children, and a life of continual change,
and yet he is bored and doesn't like anything, and this peaceful, green
garden, with its innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful
solitudes, says nothing at all to him. Is it his own fault or the fault
of his world? He doesn't know. He supposes it is the fault of his liver.
His father was alw