ld); I wish to
be original. At the same time, I think one suffers more than one
realises from the system of free imports. I should like, for instance, a
really prohibitive duty put upon the partner who declares on a weak red
suit and hopes for the best. Even a free outlet for compressed verbiage
doesn't balance matters. And I think there should be a sort of bounty-
fed export (is that the right expression?) of the people who impress on
you that you ought to take life seriously. There are only two classes
that really can't help taking life seriously--schoolgirls of thirteen and
Hohenzollerns; they might be exempt. Albanians come under another
heading; they take life whenever they get the opportunity. The one
Albanian that I was ever on speaking terms with was rather a decadent
example. He was a Christian and a grocer, and I don't fancy he had ever
killed anybody. I didn't like to question him on the subject--that
showed my delicacy. Mrs. Nicorax says I have no delicacy; she hasn't
forgiven me about the mice. You see, when I was staying down there, a
mouse used to cake-walk about my room half the night, and none of their
silly patent traps seemed to take its fancy as a bijou residence, so I
determined to appeal to the better side of it--which with mice is the
inside. So I called it Percy, and put little delicacies down near its
hole every night, and that kept it quiet while I read Max Nordau's
_Degeneration_ and other reproving literature, and went to sleep. And
now she says there is a whole colony of mice in that room.

That isn't where the indelicacy comes in. She went out riding with me,
which was entirely her own suggestion, and as we were coming home through
some meadows she made a quite unnecessary attempt to see if her pony
would jump a rather messy sort of brook that was there. It wouldn't. It
went with her as far as the water's edge, and from that point Mrs.
Nicorax went on alone. Of course I had to fish her out from the bank,
and my riding-breeches are not cut with a view to salmon-fishing--it's
rather an art even to ride in them. Her habit-skirt was one of those
open questions that need not be adhered to in emergencies, and on this
occasion it remained behind in some water-weeds. She wanted me to fish
about for that too, but I felt I had done enough Pharaoh's daughter
business for an October afternoon, and I was beginning to want my tea. So
I bundled her up on to her pony, and gave her a lead