“He’s very like the duke, though,” General Claviger went on, after a moment’s pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frida disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringas.  “Very like the duke.  And you saw he admitted some sort of relationship, though he didn’t like to dwell upon it.  You may be sure he’s a by-blow of the family somehow.  One of the Bertrams, perhaps the old duke who was out in the Crimea, may have formed an attachment for one of these Ingledew girls—­the cobbler’s sisters:  I dare say they were no better in their conduct than they ought to be—­and this may be the consequence.”

“I’m afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful conversation,” the Dean put in, with a tone of professional disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the high-placed.  “He didn’t seem to set the example he ought to have done to his poorer brethren.”

“Oh, he was a thorough old rip, the duke, if it comes to that,” General Claviger responded, twirling his white moustache.  “And so’s the present man—­a rip of the first water.  They’re a regular bad lot, the Bertrams, root and stock.  They never set an example of anything to anybody—­bar horse-breeding,—­as far as I’m aware; and even at that their trainers have always fairly cheated ’em.”

“The present duke’s a most exemplary churchman,” the Dean interposed, with Christian charity for a nobleman of position.  “He gave us a couple of thousand last year for the cathedral restoration fund.”

“And that would account,” Philip put in, returning abruptly to the previous question, which had been exercising him meanwhile, “for the peculiarly distinguished air of birth and breeding this man has about him.”  For Philip respected a duke from the bottom of his heart, and cherished the common Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated to that highest degree in our barbaric rank-system must acquire at the same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew changes his Semitic features for the European shape on conversion and baptism.

“Oh, dear, no,” the General answered in his most decided voice.  “The Bertrams were never much to look at in any way:  and as for the old duke, he was as insignificant a little monster of red-haired ugliness as ever you’d see in a day’s march anywhere.  If he hadn’t been a duke, with a rent-roll of forty odd thousand a year, he’d never have got that beautiful Lady Camilla to consent to marry him.  But, bless you, women ’ll do anything for the strawberry leaves.  It isn’t from the Bertrams this man gets his good looks.  It isn’t from the Bertrams.  Old Ingledew’s daughters are pretty enough girls.  If their aunts were like ’em, it’s there your young friend got his air of distinction.”

“We never know who’s who nowadays,” the Dean murmured softly.  Being himself the son of a small Scotch tradesman, brought up in the Free Kirk, and elevated into his present exalted position by the early intervention of a Balliol scholarship and a studentship of Christ Church, he felt at liberty to moralise in such non-committing terms on the gradual decay of aristocratic exclusiveness.