’The nine twenty-seven, sir.  Yes, sir.  Early breakfast will be at half-past eight and the car will be at the door at nine.’

‘Peters!’ an imperious young voice called.  ’What’s the matteh with Lord Marshalton’s Ordeh of the Gyartah?  We cyan’t find it anyweah.’

’Well, miss, I have heard that that Order is usually returned to His Majesty on the death of the holder.  Yes, miss.’  Then in a whisper to a footman, ‘More butter for the pop-corn in King Charles’s Corner.’  He stopped behind my chair.  ’Your room is Number Eleven, sir.  May I trouble you for your keys?’

He left the room with a six-year-old maiden called Alice who had announced she would not go to bed ’’less Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater takes me—­so there!’

He very kindly looked in on me for a moment as I was dressing for dinner.  ‘Not at all, sir,’ he replied to some compliment I paid him.  ’I valeted the late Lord Marshalton for fifteen years.  He was very abrupt in his movements, sir.  As a rule I never received more than an hour’s notice of a journey.  We used to go to Syria frequently.  I have been twice to Babylon.  Mr. and Mrs. Zigler’s requirements are, comparatively speaking, few.’

‘But the guests?’

’Very little out of the ordinary as soon as one knows their ordinaries.  Extremely simple, if I may say so, sir.’

I had the privilege of taking Mrs. Burton in to dinner, and was rewarded with an entirely new, and to me rather shocking view, of Abraham Lincoln, who, she said, had wasted the heritage of his land by blood and fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens.  ‘My brother, suh,’ she said, ’fell at Gettysburg in order that Armenians should colonise New England to-day.  If I took any interest in any dam-Yankee outside of my son-in-law Laughton yondah, I should say that my brother’s death had been amply avenged.’

The man at her right took up the challenge, and the war spread.  Her eyes twinkled over the flames she had lit.

‘Don’t these folk,’ she said a little later, ’remind you of Arabs picnicking under the Pyramids?’

‘I’ve never seen the Pyramids,’ I replied.

‘Hm!  I didn’t know you were as English as all that.’  And when I laughed, ‘Are you?’

‘Always.  It saves trouble.’

’Now that’s just what I find so significant among the English’—­this was Alice’s mother, I think, with one elbow well forward among the salted almonds.  ’Oh, I know how you feel, Madam Burton, but a Northerner like myself—­I’m Buffalo—­even though we come over every year—­notices the desire for comfort in England.  There’s so little conflict or uplift in British society.’

‘But we like being comfortable,’ I said.

’I know it.  It’s very characteristic.  But ain’t it a little, just a little, lacking in adaptability an’ imagination?’

‘They haven’t any need for adaptability,’ Madam Burton struck in.  ’They haven’t any Ellis Island standards to live up to.’