the subject of
pleasing the heiress, as I see great signs of Lord Luffton cutting the
ground from under your feet."

He stared at me incredulously.

"Luffy!" he said, aghast. "Oh, but Cordelia would take care of that.
He is her friend."

"Oh, how you amuse me, all of you," I said, laughing, "with your loves
and your jealousies and your little arrangements! Every one two and
two; every one with a 'friend.'"

"Anyway, we are not wearyingly faithful."

"No; but to a stranger you ought to issue a kind of
guide-book--'Trespassers will be prosecuted' here, 'A change would
be welcomed' there, etc."

"'Pon my word new editions would have to come out every three months,
then. In the space of a year you would find a general shuffle had
taken place."

"Shall you let your Duchess have a 'friend'?" I asked.

He mused a little.

"Could I have found my cow brewer's daughter, she would have been too
virtuously middle class to have thought of such a thing. And if I take
this American--well, the Americans are so new a nation they have still
a moral sense. So I think I am pretty safe."

"Old nations are deficient in this quality, then?"

"Yes. Artificial things are more worn out, and they get back nearer
to nature."

"But you would object to a 'friend'?"

"Considerably, until the succession was firmly secured. After that,
I suppose, my Duchess might please herself. She probably would, too,
without consulting me. You don't see the whole of your neighbors
eating cake and remain content with your own monotonous
bread-and-butter."

This appeared to be very true. He continued in a meditative way:

"Because a few what we call civilized nations have set up a standard
of morality for themselves, that does not change the ways of human
nature. What we call morality has no existence in the natural world."

"Why should the respectable middle-class brewer's daughter have so
strong a sense of it, then?" I asked.

"Because propriety is their god from one generation to another. You
can almost overcome nature with a god sometimes. Babykins has a theory
that the food we eat makes a difference in the ways of our class, but
I don't believe that. It is because we hunt and shoot and live lives
of inclination, not compulsion, like the middle classes, and so we get
back nearer to nature."

"You are a sophist, I fear," I said, smiling. "See, here is Miss
Martina B. Cadwallader advancing upon us. Stern virtue is on every
line of her face,