one's last 'bus. A woman, he said, who is
careless of disappearances is capable of leaving town before Goodwood,
and dying at the wrong moment of an unfashionable disease.
The Duchess thought that Reginald did not exceed the ethical standard
which circumstances demanded.
"Of course," she resumed combatively, "it's the prevailing fashion to
believe in perpetual change and mutability, and all that sort of thing,
and to say we are all merely an improved form of primeval ape--of course
you subscribe to that doctrine?"
"I think it decidedly premature; in most people I know the process is far
from complete."
"And equally of course you are quite irreligious?"
"Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind
with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the
one with the modern conveniences of the other."
The Duchess suppressed a sniff. She was one of those people who regard
the Church of England with patronising affection, as if it were something
that had grown up in their kitchen garden.
"But there are other things," she continued, "which I suppose are to a
certain extent sacred even to you. Patriotism, for instance, and Empire,
and Imperial responsibility, and blood-is-thicker-than-water, and all
that sort of thing."
Reginald waited for a couple of minutes before replying, while the Lord
of Rimini temporarily monopolised the acoustic possibilities of the
theatre.
"That is the worst of a tragedy," he observed, "one can't always hear
oneself talk. Of course I accept the Imperial idea and the
responsibility. After all, I would just as soon think in Continents as
anywhere else. And some day, when the season is over and we have the
time, you shall explain to me the exact blood-brotherhood and all that
sort of thing that exists between a French Canadian and a mild Hindoo and
a Yorkshireman, for instance."
"Oh, well, 'dominion over palm and pine,' you know," quoted the Duchess
hopefully; "of course we mustn't forget that we're all part of the great
Anglo-Saxon Empire."
"Which for its part is rapidly becoming a suburb of Jerusalem. A very
pleasant suburb, I admit, and quite a charming Jerusalem. But still a
suburb."
"Really, to be told one's living in a suburb when one is conscious of
spreading the benefits of civilisation all over the world! Philanthropy--I
suppose you will say _that_ is a comfortable delusion; and yet even you
must admit that when
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