It was part of my programme, the attendance at the poultry show; I was to go back to the cottage with Churchill, after he had made his speech.  It was rather extraordinary, the sensations of that function.  I went in rather late, with the reporter of the Hour, who was anxious to do me the favour of introducing me without payment—­it was his way of making himself pleasant, and I had the reputation of knowing celebrities.  It was rather extraordinary to be back again in the midst of this sort of thing, to be walking over a crowded, green paddock, hedged in with tall trees and dotted here and there with the gaily striped species of tent that is called marquee.  And the type of face, and the style of the costume!  They would have seemed impossible the day before yesterday.

There were all Miss Churchill’s gang of great dames, muslin, rustling, marriageable daughters, a continual twitter of voices, and a sprinkling of the peasantry, dun-coloured and struck speechless.

One of the great ladies surveyed me as I stood in the centre of an open space, surveyed me through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a long handle, and beckoned me to her side.

“You are unattached?” she asked.  She had pretensions to voice the county, just as my aunt undoubtedly set the tone of its doings, decided who was visitable, and just as Miss Churchill gave the political tone.  “You may wait upon me, then,” she said; “my daughter is with her young man.  That is the correct phrase, is it not?”

She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot high, and whom one would have styled buxom, had one dared.  “I have a grievance,” she went on; “I must talk to someone.  Come this way. There!” She pointed with the handle of her glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds.  “You see!...  Not even commended!—­and I assure you the trouble I have taken over them, with the idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is incredible.  They give a prize to one of our own tenants ... which is as much as telling the man that he is an example to me.  Then they wonder that the country is going to the dogs.  I assure you that after breakfast I have had the scraps collected from the plates—­that was the course recommended by the poultry manuals—­and have taken them out with my own hands.”

The sort of thing passed for humour in the county, and, being delivered with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough.

“And that reminds me,” she went on, “—­I mean the fact that the country is going to the dogs, as my husband [You haven’t seen him anywhere, have you?  He is one of the judges, and I want to have a word with him about my Orpingtons] says every morning after he has looked at his paper—­that ... oh, that you have been in Paris, haven’t you? with your aunt.  Then, of course, you have seen this famous Duc de Mersch?”