d passed, "there
must be a few agreeable people here. I am sure I saw some very
nice-looking women to-day coming in from the fox-hunt. And very well
gotten up, too, in Karki habits. And the men were handsome,
decent-looking chaps--Englishmen, I think."

"Who does he mean? Were you at the meet to-day?" asked Carroll.

The Tammany chieftain said no, that he did not ride--not after foxes,
in any event. "But I saw Mrs. Hornby and her sister coming back," he
said. "They had on those linen habits."

"Well, now, there's a woman who illustrates just what I have been
saying," continued Carroll. "You picked her out as a self-respecting,
nice-looking girl--and so she is--but she wouldn't like to have to
tell all she knows. No, they are all pretty much alike. They wear
low-neck frocks, and the men put on evening dress for dinner, and they
ride after foxes, and they drop in to five-o'clock tea, and they all
play that they're a lot of gilded saints, and it's one of the rules of
the game that you must believe in the next man, so that he will
believe in you. I'm breaking the rules myself now, because I say
'they' when I ought to say 'we.' We're none of us here for our health,
Holcombe, but it pleases us to pretend we are. It's a sort of give and
take. We all sit around at dinner-parties and smile and chatter, and
those English talk about the latest news from 'town,' and how they
mean to run back for the season or the hunting. But they know they
don't dare go back, and they know that everybody at the table knows
it, and that the servants behind them know it. But it's more easy that
way. There's only a few of us here, and we've got to hang together or
we'd go crazy."

"That's so," said Meakim, approvingly. "It makes it more sociable."

"It's a funny place," continued Carroll. The wine had loosened his
tongue, and it was something to him to be able to talk to one of his
own people again, and to speak from their point of view, so that the
man who had gone through St. Paul's and Harvard with him would see it
as such a man should. "It's a funny place, because, in spite of the
fact that it's a prison, you grow to like it for its freedom. You can
do things here you can't do in New York, and pretty much everything
goes there, or it used to, where I hung out. But here you're just your
own master, and there's no law and no religion and no relations nor
newspapers to poke into what you do nor how you live. You can
understand what I mean if y