“Married!  Catch me at it—­if you can.  No, dear boy, I am very fond of you, and you are one of the right sort to make me the offer; but I wont let you put a collar round my neck.  Matrimony is all very fine for women who have no better way of supporting themselves, but it wouldnt suit me.  Dont look so dazed.  What difference does it make to you?”

“But——­” He stopped, bewildered, gazing at her.

“Get out, you great goose!” she said, and suddenly sprang out of the hansom and darted into the theatre.

He sat gaping after her, horrified—­genuinely horrified.

CHAPTER III

The Earl of Carbury was a youngish man with no sort of turn for being a nobleman.  He could not bring himself to behave as if he was anybody in particular; and though this passed for perfect breeding whenever he by chance appeared in his place in society, on the magisterial bench, or in the House of Lords, it prevented him from making the most of the earldom, and was a standing grievance with his relatives, many of whom were the most impudent and uppish people on the face of the earth.  He was, if he had only known it, a born republican, with no natural belief in earls at all; but as he was rather too modest to indulge his consciousness with broad generalizations of this kind, all he knew about the matter was that he was sensible of being a bad hand at his hereditary trade of territorial aristocrat.  At a very early age he had disgraced himself by asking his mother whether he might be a watchmaker when he grew up, and his feeble sense on that occasion of the impropriety of an earl being anything whatsoever except an earl had given his mother an imperious contempt for him which afterward got curiously mixed with a salutary dread of his moral superiority to her, which was considerable.  His aspiration to become a watchmaker was an early symptom of his extraordinary turn for mechanics.  An apprenticeship of six years at the bench would have made an educated workman of him:  as it was, he pottered at every mechanical pursuit as a gentleman amateur in a laboratory and workshop which he had got built for himself in his park.  In this magazine of toys—­for such it virtually was at first—­he satisfied his itchings to play with tools and machines.  He was no sportsman; but if he saw in a shop window the most trumpery patent improvement in a breechloader, he would go in and buy it; and as to a new repeating rifle or liquefied gas gun, he would travel to St. Petersburg to see it.  He wrote very little; but he had sixteen different typewriters, each guaranteed perfect by an American agent, who had also pledged himself that the other fifteen were miserable impostures.  A really ingenious bicycle or tricycle always found in him a ready purchaser; and he had patented a roller skate and a railway brake.  When the electric chair for dental operations was invented, he sacrificed a tooth to satisfy his curiosity as to its operation.