“We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry,” cried the duchess, nodding pleasantly to him across the table.  “Do you think he will really marry this fascinating young person?”

“I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess.”

“How dreadful!” exclaimed Lady Agatha.  “Really, some one should interfere.”

“I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American dry-goods store,” said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.

“My uncle has already suggested pork-packing Sir Thomas.”

“Dry-goods!  What are American dry-goods?” asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.

“American novels,” answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.

The duchess looked puzzled.

“Don’t mind him, my dear,” whispered Lady Agatha.  “He never means anything that he says.”

“When America was discovered,” said the Radical member—­ and he began to give some wearisome facts.  Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.  The duchess sighed and exercised her privilege of interruption.  “I wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!” she exclaimed.  “Really, our girls have no chance nowadays.  It is most unfair.”

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered,” said Mr. Erskine; “I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”

“Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants,” answered the duchess vaguely.  “I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty.  And they dress well, too.  They get all their dresses in Paris.  I wish I could afford to do the same.”

“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour’s cast-off clothes.

“Really!  And where do bad Americans go to when they die?” inquired the duchess.

“They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry.

Sir Thomas frowned.  “I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country,” he said to Lady Agatha.  “I have travelled all over it in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil.  I assure you that it is an education to visit it.”

“But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?” asked Mr. Erskine plaintively.  “I don’t feel up to the journey.”

Sir Thomas waved his hand.  “Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on his shelves.  We practical men like to see things, not to read about them.  The Americans are an extremely interesting people.  They are absolutely reasonable.  I think that is their distinguishing characteristic.  Yes, Mr. Erskine, an absolutely reasonable people.  I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans.”

“How dreadful!” cried Lord Henry.  “I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.  There is something unfair about its use.  It is hitting below the intellect.”