by sheer strength and bloodshed, and can as easily hope to accomplish anything by skill as a whale can expect to dance upon the tight rope.  They would do better, thought Lady Victoria, to give it up, to abandon the struggle for intellectual superiority of that kind.  They have produced greater minds when, the mass of their countrymen were steeped in brutality, and Elizabethan surfeit of beef and ale, than they will ever produce with a twopenny-halfpenny universal education.  What is the use?  Progress.  What is progress?  Merely the adequate arrangement of inequalities—­in the words of one of their own thinkers who knows most about it and troubles himself least about theories.  What is the use of your “universal” education, to which nine-tenths of the population submit as to a hopeless evil, which takes bread out of their mouths and puts bran into their heads; for might they not be at work in the fields instead of scratching pothooks on a slate?  At least so Lady Victoria thought.

“You look just like a sailor,” said she to Claudius.

“I feel like one,” he answered, “and I think I shall adopt the sea as a profession.”

“It is such a pity,” said Miss Skeat, sternly clutching the twisted wire shroud.  “I would like to see you turn pirate; it would be so picturesque—­you and Mr. Barker.”  The others laughed, not at the idea of Claudius sporting the black flag—­for he looked gloomy enough to do murder in the first degree this morning—­but the picture of the exquisite and comfort-loving Mr. Barker, with his patent-leather shoes and his elaborate travelling apparatus, leading a band of black-browed ruffians to desperate deeds of daring and blood, was novel enough to be exhilarating; and they laughed loudly.  They did not understand Mr. Barker; but perhaps Miss Skeat, who liked him with an old-maidenly liking, had some instinct notion that the gentle American could be dangerous.

“Mr. Barker would never do for a pirate,” laughed Lady Victoria; “he would be always getting his feet wet and having attacks of neuralgia.”

“Take care, Vick,” said her brother, “he might hear you.”

“Well, if he did?  I only said he would get his feet wet.  There is no harm in that, and it is clear he has neuralgia, because he says it himself.”

“Well, of course,” said the Duke, “if that is what you mean.  But he will wet his feet fast enough when there is any good reason.”

“If you make it ‘worth his while,’ of course,” said Lady Victoria, “I have no doubt of it.”  She turned up her nose, for she was not very fond of Mr. Barker, and she thought poorly of the Duke’s financial enterprises in America.  It was not a bit like a good old English gentleman to be always buying and selling mines and stocks and all sorts of things with queer names.

“Look here, Vick, we won’t talk any more about Barker, if you please.”

“Very well, then you can talk about the weather,” said she.