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.’

With the assistance of Mr. Stukely Culbrett, Mrs. Lespel prepared the house and those of the company who were in the secret of affairs for the arrival of Beauchamp.  The ladies were curious to see him.  The gentlemen, not anticipating extreme amusement, were calm:  for it is an axiom in the world of buckskins and billiard-cues, that one man is very like another; and so true is it with them, that they can in time teach it to the fair sex.  Friends of Cecil Baskelett predominated, and the absence of so sprightly a fellow was regretted seriously; but he was shooting with his uncle at Holdesbury, and they did not expect him before Thursday.

On Wednesday morning Lord Palmet presented himself at a remarkably well-attended breakfast-table at Itchincope.  He passed from Mrs. Lespel to Mrs. Wardour-Devsreux and Miss Halkett, bowed to other ladies, shook hands with two or three men, and nodded over the heads of half-a-dozen, accounting rather mysteriously for his delay in coming, it was thought, until he sat down before a plate of Yorkshire pie, and said: 

‘The fact is I’ve been canvassing hard.  With Beauchamp!’

Astonishment and laughter surrounded him, and Palmet looked from face to face, equally astonished, and desirous to laugh too.

‘Ernest! how could you do that?’ said Mrs. Lespel; and her husband cried in stupefaction, ‘With Beauchamp?’

‘Oh! it’s because of the Radicalism,’ Palmet murmured to himself.  ’I didn’t mind that.’