rd?), as long as one is nice-looking and sufficiently
unusual to counterbalance some of the others; and there _are_ others--the
girl, for instance, who reads Meredith, and appears at meals with
unnatural punctuality in a frock that's made at home and repented at
leisure. She eventually finds her way to India and gets married, and
comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to imagine that an
indifferent prawn curry is for ever an effective substitute for all that
we have been taught to believe is luncheon. It's then that she is really
dangerous; but at her worst she is never quite so bad as the woman who
fires _Exchange and Mart_ questions at you without the least provocation.
Imagine the other day, just when I was doing my best to understand half
the things I was saying, being asked by one of those seekers after
country home truths how many fowls she could keep in a run ten feet by
six, or whatever it was! I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept
the door shut, and the idea didn't seem to have struck her before; at
least, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.

Of course, as I say, one never really _knows_ one's ground, and one may
make mistakes occasionally. But then one's mistakes sometimes turn out
assets in the long-run: if we had never bungled away our American
colonies we might never have had the boy from the States to teach us how
to wear our hair and cut our clothes, and we must get our ideas from
somewhere, I suppose. Even the Hooligan was probably invented in China
centuries before we thought of him. England must wake up, as the Duke of
Devonshire said the other day; wasn't it? Oh, well, it was someone else.
Not that I ever indulge in despair about the Future; there always have
been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the
Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted
according to their lights. It is dreadful to think that other people's
grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable.

There are moments when one sympathises with Herod.

REGINALD AT THE CARLTON

"A most variable climate," said the Duchess; "and how unfortunate that we
should have had that very cold weather at a time when coal was so dear!
So distressing for the poor."

"Someone has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big
dividends," remarked Reginald.

The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old-
fashioned to disl