rival of Arthur
Adister for military brevity.

'Your nephew is quite the diplomatist,' said Mrs. Dyke, admiring
Philip's head.

'Cousin, ma'am. Nephews I might drive to any market to make the most
of them. Cousins pretend they're better than pigs, and diverge bounding
from the road at the hint of the stick. You can't get them to grunt more
than is exactly agreeable to them.'

'My belief is that if our cause is just our flag will triumph,' Miss
Grace Barrow, Jane Mattock's fellow-worker and particular friend,
observed to Dr. Forbery.

'You may be enjoying an original blessing that we in Ireland missed in
the cradle,' said he.

She emphasised: 'I speak of the just cause; it must succeed.'

'The stainless flag'll be in the ascendant in the long run,' he
assented.

'Is it the flag of Great Britain you're speaking of, Forbery?' the
captain inquired.

'There's a harp or two in it,' he responded pacifically.

Mrs. Dyke was not pleased with the tone. 'And never will be out of it!'
she thumped her interjection.

'Or where 's your music?' said the captain, twinkling for an adversary
among the males, too distant or too dull to distinguish a note of
challenge. 'You'd be having to mount your drum and fife in their places,
ma'am.'

She saw no fear of the necessity.

'But the fife's a pretty instrument,' he suggested, and with a candour
that seduced the unwary lady to think dubiously whether she quite liked
the fife. Miss Barrow pronounced it cheerful.

'Oh, and martial!' he exclaimed, happy to have caught Rockney's
deliberate gaze. 'The effect of it, I'm told in the provinces is
astonishing for promoting enlistment. Hear it any morning in your London
parks, at the head of a marching regiment of your giant foot-Guards.
Three bangs of the drum, like the famous mountain, and the fife
announces himself to be born, and they follow him, left leg and right
leg and bearskin. And what if he's a small one and a trifle squeaky; so
's a prince when the attendant dignitaries receive him submissively
and hear him informing the nation of his advent. It 's the idea that 's
grand.'

'The idea is everything in military affairs,' a solemn dupe, a Mr.
Rumford, partly bald, of benevolent aspect, and looking more copious
than his flow, observed to the lady beside him. 'The flag is only an
idea.'

She protested against the barbarism of war, and he agreed with her,
but thought it must be: it had always been: he deplored the fatality.