Mr. Rumford drank some champagne and murmured with a shrug to the acquiescent lady beside him:  ‘Irishmen!’ implying that the race could not be brought to treat serious themes as befitted the seriousness of the sentiments they stir in their bosoms.  He was personally a little hurt, having unfolded a shy secret of his feelings, which were keenly patriotic in a phlegmatic frame, and he retired within himself, assuring the lady that he accepted our standard in its integrity; his objection was not really an objection; it was, he explained to her, a ridiculous desire to have a perfect comprehension of the idea in the symbol.  But where there was no seriousness everything was made absurd.  He could, he said, laugh as well as others on the proper occasion.  As for the Lion being stuffed, he warned England’s enemies for their own sakes not to be deluded by any such patent calumny.  The strong can afford to be magnanimous and forbearing.  Only let not that be mistaken for weakness.  A wag of his tail would suffice.

The lady agreed.  But women are volatile.  She was the next moment laughing at something she had heard with the largest part of her ear, and she thought the worthy gentleman too simple, though she knew him for one who had amassed wealth.  Captain Con and Dr. Forbery had driven the Unicorn to shelter, and were now baiting the Lion.  The tremendous import of that wag of his tail among the nations was burlesqued by them, and it came into collision with Mr. Rumford’s legendary forefinger threat.  She excused herself for laughing: 

‘They are so preposterous!’

‘Yes, yes, I can laugh,’ said he, soberly performing the act:  and Mr. Rumford covered the wound his delicate sensations had experienced under an apology for Captain Con, that would redound to the credit of his artfulness were it not notorious our sensations are the creatures and born doctors of art in discovering unguents for healing their bruises.  ’O’Donnell has a shrewd head for business.  He is sound at heart.  There is not a drop of gout in his wine.’

The lady laughed again, as we do when we are fairly swung by the tide, and underneath her convulsion she quietly mused on the preference she would give to the simple English citizen for soundness.

‘What can they be discussing down there?’ Miss Mattock said to Philip, enviously as poor Londoners in November when they receive letters from the sapphire Riviera.

‘I will venture to guess at nonsense,’ he answered.

‘Nothing political, then.’

’That scarcely follows; but a host at his own table may be trusted to shelve politics.’

‘I should not object.’

‘To controversy?’

‘Temperately conducted.’

‘One would go a long way to see the exhibition.’

‘But why cannot men be temperate in their political arguments?’

‘The questions raised are too close about the roots of us.’