“Ungrateful wretch,” he said—­“after that dinner last night!”

“All the same, Matthew Arnold had that dinner in mind—­chef and all!  Listen!  ’The graver self of the Barbarian likes honours and consideration; his more relaxed self, field-sports and pleasures.’  Isn’t it exact?  Grouse-driving in the morning—­bridge, politics, Cabinet-making, and the best of food in the evening.  And I should put our hostess very high—­wouldn’t you?—­among the chatelaines of the ’great fortified posts’?”

Meadows assented, but rather languidly.  The day was extremely hot; he was tired, moreover, by a long walk with the guns the day before, and by conversation after dinner, led by Lady Dunstable, which had lasted up to nearly one o’clock in the morning.  The talk had been brilliant, no doubt.  Meadows, however, did not feel that he had come off very well in it.  His hostess had deliberately pitted him against two of the ablest men in England, and he was well aware that he had disappointed her.  Lady Dunstable had a way of behaving to her favourite author or artist of the moment as though she were the fancier and he the cock.  She fought him against the other people’s cocks with astonishing zeal and passion; and whenever he failed to kill, or lost too many feathers in the process, her annoyance was evident.

Meadows was in truth becoming a little tired of her dictation, although it was only ten days since he had arrived under her roof.  There was a large amount of lethargy combined with his ability; and he hated to be obliged to live at any pace but his own.  But Rachel Dunstable was an imperious friend, never tired herself, apparently, either in mind or body; and those who could not walk, eat, and talk to please her were apt to know it.  Her opinions too, both political and literary, were in some directions extremely violent; and though, in general, argument and contradiction gave her pleasure, she had her days and moods, and Meadows had already suffered occasional sets-down, of a kind to which he was not accustomed.

But if he was—­just a little—­out of love with his new friend, in all other respects he was enjoying himself enormously.  The long days on the moors, the luxurious life indoors, the changing and generally agreeable company, all the thousand easements and pleasures that wealth brings with it, the skilled service, the motors, the costly cigars, the wines—­there was a Sybarite in Meadows which revelled in them all.  He had done without them; he would do without them again; but there they were exceedingly good creatures of God, while they lasted; and only the hypocrites pretended otherwise.  His sympathy, in the old poverty-stricken days, would have been all with the plaintive American--“There’s d-----d good times in the world, and I ain’t in ’em.”