Once only had Diana to protect her nurseling.  He cited a funny line from a recent popular volume of verse, in perfect A propos, looking at Sullivan Smith; who replied, that the poets had become too many for him, and he read none now.  Diana said:  ’There are many Alexanders, but Alexander of Macedon is not dwarfed by the number.’  She gave him an opening for a smarter reply, but he lost it in a comment—­against Whitmonby’s cardinal rule:  ’The neatest turn of the wrist that ever swung a hero to crack a crown!’ and he bowed to young Rhodes:  ’I ’ll read your versicler to-morrow morning early.’  The latter expressed a fear that the hour was too critical for poetry.

‘I have taken the dose at a very early hour,’ said Whitmonby, to bring conversation to the flow again, ’and it effaced the critical mind completely.’

‘But did not silence the critical nose,’ observed Westlake.

Wilmers named the owner of the longest nose in Europe.

‘Potentially, indeed a critic!’ said Diana.

’Nights beside it must be fearful, and good matter for a divorce, if the poor dear lady could hale it to the doors of the Vatican!’ Sullivan Smith exclaimed.  ‘But there’s character in noses.’

‘Calculable by inches?’ Dacier asked.

‘More than in any other feature,’ said Lady Dunstane.  ’The Riffords are all prodigiously gifted and amusing:  suspendens omnia naso.  It should be prayed for in families.’

‘Totum ut to faciant, Fabulle, nasum,’ rejoined Whitmonby.  ’Lady Isabella was reading the tale of the German princess, who had a sentinel stationed some hundred yards away to whisk off the flies, and she owned to me that her hand instinctively travelled upward.’

’Candour is the best concealment, when one has to carry a saddle of absurdity,’ said Diana.  ’Touchstone’s “poor thing, but mine own,” is godlike in its enveloping fold.’

‘The most comforting sermon ever delivered on property in poverty,’ said Arthur Rhodes.

Westlake assented.  ’His choice of Audrey strikes me as an exhibition of the sure instinct for pasture of the philosophical jester in a forest.’

’ With nature’s woman, if he can find her, the urban seems equally at home,’ said Lady Dunstane.

‘Baron Pawle is an example,’ added Whitmonby.  ’His cook is a pattern wife to him.  I heard him say at table that she was responsible for all except the wines.  “I wouldn’t have them on my conscience, with a Judge!” my lady retorted.’

‘When poor Madame de Jacquieres was dying,’ said Wilmers, ’her confessor sat by her bedside, prepared for his ministrations.  “Pour commencer, mon ami, jamais je n’ai fait rien hors nature."’

Lord Wadaster had uttered something tolerably similar:  ’I am a sinner, and in good society.’  Sir Abraham Hartiston, a minor satellite of the Regent, diversified this:  ‘I am a sinner, and go to good society.’  Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Aigle, the cause of many deaths, declared it unwomanly to fear anything save ‘les revenants.’  Yet the countess could say the pretty thing:  ‘Foot on a flower, then think of me!’