Peterborough was plied by the squire for a description of German women.  Blushing and shooting a timid look from under his pendulous eyelids at my aunt, indicating that he was prepared to go the way of tutors at Riversley, he said he really had not much observed them.

‘They’re a whitey-brown sort of women, aren’t they?’ the squire questioned him, ‘with tow hair and fish eyes, high o’ the shoulder, bony, and a towel skin and gone teeth, so I’ve heard tell.  I’ve heard that’s why the men have all taken to their beastly smoking.’

Peterborough ejaculated:  ‘Indeed! sir, really!’ He assured my aunt that German ladies were most agreeable, cultivated persons, extremely domesticated, retiring; the encomiums of the Roman historian were as well deserved by them in the present day as they had been in the past; decidedly, on the whole, Peterborough would call them a virtuous race.

‘Why do they let the men smoke, then?’ said the squire.  ’A pretty style o’ courtship.  Come, sit by my hearth, ma’am; I ’ll be your chimney—­faugh! dirty rascals!’

Janet said:  ‘I rather like the smell of cigars.’

‘Like what you please, my dear—­he’ll be a lucky dog,’ the squire approved her promptly, and asked me if I smoked.

I was not a stranger to the act, I confessed.

’Well’—­he took refuge in practical philosophy—­’a man must bring some dirt home from every journey:  only don’t smoke me out, mercy’s sake.’

Here was a hint of Janet’s influence with him, and of what he expected from my return to Riversley.

Peterborough informed me that he suffered persecution over the last glasses of Port in the evening, through the squire’s persistent inquiries as to whether a woman had anything to do with my staying so long abroad.  ‘A lady, sir?’ quoth Peterborough.  ‘Lady, if you like,’ rejoined the squire.  ’You parsons and petticoats must always mince the meat to hash the fact.’  Peterborough defended his young friend Harry’s moral reputation, and was amazed to hear that the squire did not think highly of a man’s chastity.  The squire acutely chagrined the sensitive gentleman by drawling the word after him, and declaring that he tossed that kind of thing into the women’s wash-basket.  Peterborough, not without signs of indignation, protesting, the squire asked him point-blank if he supposed that Old England had been raised to the head of the world by such as he.  In fine, he favoured Peterborough with a lesson in worldly views.  ’But these,’ Peterborough said to me, ’are not the views, dear Harry—­if they are the views of ladies of any description, which I take leave to doubt—­not the views of the ladies you and I would esteem.  For instance, the ladies of this household.’  My aunt Dorothy’s fate was plain.

In reply to my grandfather’s renewed demand to know whether any one of those High-Dutch women had got hold of me, Peterborough said:  ’Mr. Beltham, the only lady of whom it could be suspected that my friend Harry regarded her with more than ordinary admiration was Hereditary-Princess of one of the ancient princely Houses of Germany.’  My grandfather thereupon said, ‘Oh!’ pushed the wine, and was stopped.