’My dear Mrs. Lespel, wait till you have heard him.  He is at war with everything we venerate and build on.  The wife you would give him should be a creature rooted in nothing—­in sea-water.  Simply two or three conversations with him have made me uncomfortable ever since; I can see nothing durable; I dream of surprises, outbreaks, dreadful events.  At least it is perfectly true that I do not look with the same eyes on my country.  He seems to delight in destroying one’s peaceful contemplation of life.  The truth is that he blows a perpetual gale, and is all agitation,’ Cecilia concluded, affecting with a smile a slight shiver.

‘Yes, one tires of that,’ said Mrs. Lespel.  ’I was determined I would have him here if we could get him to come.  Grancey objected.  We shall have to manage Captain Beauchamp and the rest as well.  He is sure to come late to-morrow, and will leave early on Thursday morning for his canvass; our driving into Bevisham is for Friday or Saturday.  I do not see that he need have any suspicions.  Those verses you are so angry about cannot be traced to Itchincope.  My dear, they are a childish trifle.  When my husband stood first for Bevisham, the whole of his University life appeared in print.  What we have to do is to forewarn the gentlemen to be guarded, and especially in what they say to my nephew Lord Palmet, for that boy cannot keep a secret; he is as open as a plate.’

‘The smoking-room at night?’ Cecilia suggested, remembering her father’s words about Itchincope’s tobacco-hall.

‘They have Captain Beauchamp’s address hung up there, I have heard,’ said Mrs. Lespel.  ’There may be other things—­another address, though it is not yet, placarded.  Come with me.  For fifteen years I have never once put my head into that room, and now I ‘ve a superstitious fear about it.’

Mrs. Lespel led the way to the deserted smoking-room, where the stale reek of tobacco assailed the ladies, as does that dire place of Customs the stranger visiting savage (or too natural) potentates.

In silence they tore down from the wall Beauchamp’s electoral Address—­ flanked all its length with satirical pen and pencil comments and sketches; and they consigned to flames the vast sheet of animated verses relating to the French marquees.  A quarter-size chalk-drawing of a slippered pantaloon having a duck on his shoulder, labelled to say ‘Quack-quack,’ and offering our nauseated Dame Britannia (or else it was the widow Bevisham) a globe of a pill to swallow, crossed with the consolatory and reassuring name of Shrapnel, they disposed of likewise.  And then they fled, chased forth either by the brilliancy of the politically allusive epigrams profusely inscribed around them on the walls, or by the atmosphere.  Mrs. Lespel gave her orders for the walls to be scraped, and said to Cecilia:  ’A strange air to breathe, was it not?  The less men and women know of one another, the happier for them.  I knew my superstition was correct as a guide to me.  I do so much wish to respect men, and all my experience tells me the Turks know best how to preserve it for us.  Two men in this house would give their wives for pipes, if it came to the choice.  We might all go for a cellar of old wine.  After forty, men have married their habits, and wives are only an item in the list, and not the most important.’