Dudley did not.  He sharpened his mouth.

‘Buried, you said, sir?—­a widower?’

‘I’ve no positive information; we shall hear when he:  comes back,’ Victor replied hurriedly.  ’He got a drenching of all the damns in the British service from his.  Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper’s negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes Dartrey to his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation.  Good soldier lost.  And I can’t complain; he has been a right-hand man to me over in Africa.  But a man ought to have some control of his temper, especially a soldier.’

Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.

’Worse than that temper of Dartrey’s, he can’t forgive an injury.  He bears a grudge against his country.  You’ve heard Colney Durance abuse old England.  It’s three parts factitious-literary exercise.  It ’s milk beside the contempt of Dartrey’s shrug.  He thinks we’re a dead people, if a people; “subsisting on our fat,” as Colney says.’

‘I am not of opinion that we show it,’ observed Dudley.

‘We don’t,’ Victor agreed.  He disrelished his companion’s mincing tone of a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to be at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens, who little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the gentleman cordially signifying full agreement.  But Dudley was not gifted to read behind words and looks.

They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was this young Dudley saying, quite commendably:  ’It’s a pity we seem to have no means of keeping our parks select.’

Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought.  He remembered a fable of Fenellan’s, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure in their hymning.

‘Have you seen anything offensive to you?’ he asked.

‘One sees notorious persons.’

Dudley spoke aloof from them—­’out of his cold attics,’ Fenellan would have said.

Victor approved:  with the deadened feeling common to us when first in sad earnest we consent to take life as it is.

He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the fatherly embrace of goodness.

Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of Lakelands.  If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his morality!  But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his armour.  One had to approve.  And there was no getting away from him.  He was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for him at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a corner of the Strand.