‘Please to say yours too.’

’I’ve no class.  I say that the education for women is to teach them to rely on themselves.’

‘Ah! well, I don’t object, if I’m the man.’

’Because you and your set are absolutely uncivilized in your views of women.’

‘Common sense, Beauchamp!’

’Prey.  You eye them as prey.  And it comes of an idle aristocracy.  You have no faith in them, and they repay you for your suspicion.’

’All the same, Beauchamp, she ought not to be allowed to go about at night with that fellow.  “Rich and rare were the gems she wore”:  but that was in Erin’s isle, and if we knew the whole history, she’d better have stopped at home.  She’s marvellously pretty, to my mind.  She looks a high-bred wench.  Odd it is, Beauchamp, to see a lady’s-maid now and then catch the style of my lady.  No, by Jove!  I’ve known one or two—­you couldn’t tell the difference!  Not till you were intimate.  I know one would walk a minuet with a duchess.  Of course—­all the worse for her.  If you see that uncle of Miss Denham’s—­upon my honour, I should advise him:  I mean, counsel him not to trust her with any fellow but you.’

Beauchamp asked Lord Palmet how old he was.

Palmet gave his age; correcting the figures from six-and-twenty to one year more.  ‘And never did a stroke of work in my life,’ he said, speaking genially out of an acute guess at the sentiments of the man he walked with.

It seemed a farcical state of things.

There was a kind of contrition in Palmet’s voice, and to put him at his ease, as well as to stamp something in his own mind, Beauchamp said:  ‘It’s common enough.’

CHAPTER XX

A DAY AT ITCHINCOPE

An election in Bevisham was always an exciting period at Itchincope, the large and influential old estate of the Lespels, which at one time, with but a ceremonious drive through the town, sent you two good Whig men to Parliament to sit at Reform banquets; two unswerving party men, blest subscribers to the right Review, and personally proud of its trenchancy.  Mr. Grancey Lespel was the survivor of them, and well could he remember the happier day of his grandfather, his father, and his own hot youth.  He could be carried so far by affectionate regrets as to think of the Tories of that day benignly:—­when his champion Review of the orange and blue livery waved a wondrous sharp knife, and stuck and bled them, proving to his party, by trenchancy alone, that the Whig was the cause of Providence.  Then politics presented you a table whereat two parties feasted, with no fear of the intrusion of a third, and your backs were turned on the noisy lower world, your ears were deaf to it.

Apply we now the knocker to the door of venerable Quotation, and call the aged creature forth, that he, half choked by his eheu!—­

          ‘A sound between a sigh and bray,’