have
thousands of noble wives and mothers in England before whom Satan
himself would be obliged to bow in reverence."

"Ah, truly," says Litroff: "so have we, I dare say: I have never asked."

"No doubt you have," says Mr. Wootton, kindly. "The virtue of its women
is the great safeguard of a nation."

"One understands why England is losing her nice equipoise, then, now,"
murmurs Brandolin.

Mr. Wootton disregards him.

"But Madame Sabaroff _was_ talked about, I think,--unjustly, no doubt?"
he insists.

Mr. Wootton always insists.

"Ach!" says Litroff, apologetically, "Sabaroff was such a great brute.
It was very natural----"

"What was natural?"

"That she should console herself."

"Ah! she did console herself?"

Litroff smiles. "Ask Lord Gervase: he was Lord Baird at that time. We
all expected he would have married her when Sabaroff was shot."

"But it was Lustoff who shot Sabaroff in a duel about her?"

"Not about her. Lustoff quarrelled with him about a gambling affair, not
about her at all, though people have said so. Lord Baird--Gervase--was,
I am certain, her first lover, and has been her only one, as yet."

Brandolin flings his book with some violence on the floor, gets up, and
walks to the window. Mr. Wootton looks after him.

"No one could blame her," says Litroff, who is a good-natured man. "She
was married when she was scarcely sixteen to a brute; she was immensely
admired; she was alone in the midst of a society both loose and
brilliant; Gervase laid siege to her sans treve, and she was hardly more
than a child."

"Where there is no principle early implanted," begins Mr. Wootton----

But Litroff is not patient under preaching. "My dear sir," he says,
impatiently, "principle (of that kind) is more easily implanted in plain
women than in handsomer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud woman, which
comes to nearly the same thing as a high-principled one. She has lived
like a saint since Sabaroff was shot, and if she take up matters with
her early lover again it will only be, I imagine, this time, _pour le
bon motif_. Anyhow, I don't see why we should blame her for the past,
when the present shows us such an admirable and edifying spectacle as
miladi Waverley and miladi Usk going to sit in church with George Usk
between them!"

Whereon the Russian secretary takes a "Figaro" off the newspaper-table,
and rudely opens it and flourishes it between Mr. Wootton and himself,
in sign that the convers