“There are people,” said Lady Arthur, “who have neither common sense nor a sense of the ridiculous.”

“But they have a sense of what will pay,” answered her nephew.  “That appeals to the heart of the nation—­that is, to the masculine heart.  If Queen Bess had been handling a lancet, and Queen Vic pounding in a mortar with a pestle, assisted by her daughter-in-law, the case would have been different; but they are at useful womanly work, and the machines will sell.  They have fixed themselves in our memories already:  that’s the object the advertiser had when he pressed the passion of loyalty into his service.”

“How will the strong-minded Tudor lady like to see herself revived in that fashion, if she can see it?” asked Miss Garscube.

“She’ll like it well, judging by myself,” said George:  “that’s true fame.  I should be content to sit cross-legged on a board, stitching pulpit-robes, in a picture, if I were sure it would be hung up three hundred years after this at all the balloon-stations and have the then Miss Garscubes making remarks about me.”

“They might not make very complimentary remarks, perhaps,” said Alice.

“If they thought of me at all I should be satisfied,” said he.

“Couldn’t you invent an iron bed, then?” said Miss Adamson, looking at a representation of these articles hanging alongside the three royal ladies.  “Perhaps they’ll last three hundred years, and if you could bind yourself up with the idea of sweet repose—­”

“They won’t last three hundred years,” said Lady Arthur—­“cheap and nasty, new-fangled things!”

“They maybe cheap and nasty,” said George, “but new-fangled they are not:  they must be some thousands of years old.  I am afraid, my dear aunt, you don’t read your Bible.”

“Don’t drag the Bible in among your nonsense.  What has it to do with iron beds?” said Lady Arthur.

“If you look into Deuteronomy, third chapter and eleventh verse,” said he “you’ll find that Og, king of Bashar used an iron bed.  It is probably in existence yet, and it must be quite old enough to make it worth your while to look after it:  perhaps Mr. Cook would personally conduct you, or if not I should be glad to be your escort.”

“Thank you,” she said:  “when I go in search of Og’s bed I’ll take you with me.”

“You could not do better:  I have the scent of a sleuth-hound for antiquities.”

As they were speaking a man came and hung up beside the queens and the iron beds a big white board on which were printed in large black letters the words, “My Mother and I”—­nothing more.

“What can the meaning of that be?” asked Lady Arthur.

“To make you ask the meaning of it,” said Mr. Eildon.  “I who am skilled in these matters have no doubt that it is the herald of some soothing syrup for the human race under the trials of teething.”  He was standing at the carriage-door till the train would start, and he stood aside to let a young lady and a boy in deep mourning enter.  The pair were hardly seated when the girl’s eye fell on the great white board and its announcement.  She bent her head and hid her face in her handkerchief:  it was not difficult to guess that she had very recently parted with her mother for ever, and the words on the board were more than she could stand unmoved.