“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, anyway!”

“Pardon me, Dook,” she said, “but the guide to Myrlton I purchased at the station gave me to understand I should find a second portrait of Queen Elizabeth in this gallery.  I cannot see it.  Would you be good enough to indicate the picture to me?”

“Oh, that was a duplicate,” said the Duke, resignedly.  “I sold it at Christie’s last year.  It brought me in ten thousand pounds—­more than it was worth.  I lived in comfort upon it for quite six months.”

“You don’t say!” said Martina B. Cadwallader.

Before the party said good-night, the meanest observer could have told that things were going at sixes and sevens, no one doing exactly what was expected of them.

Signs of disturbance showed as early as the few minutes before dinner.