‘Brittle is foredoomed,’ said Diana, unruffled.

She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.

‘Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!’ said Westlake, vexed with her flush at the entrance of the Scot.

Diana sedately took his challenge.  ’We, Mr. Westlake, have the philosophy of ownership.’

Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake murmured over his head:  ‘As long as it is we who are the cracked.’

‘Did we not start from China?’

‘We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.’

‘You try to elude the lesson.’

’I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on my cranium.’

‘The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.’

It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it.  The mark of the book, if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake’s fashion of speech.  Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a woman.  She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.

Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair.  Diana smiled and said:  ’Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at Dulness.’

‘And in a dining-room too,’ added Sullivan Smith.  ’I was one day at a dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all sprang up merry as crickets.  It led to a pretty encounter and a real prize-shot.’

‘Does that signify a duel?’ asked Lady Pennon.

’’Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the populace, my lady.’

’Rank me one of the populace then!  I hate duelling and rejoice that it is discountenanced.’

‘The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,’ Diana said.  ’The citizen is generally right in morals.  My father also was against the practice, when it raged at its “prettiest.”  I have heard him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, “It’s all nonsense!” and walking to the measured length, “It’s all nonsense, you know!” and when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, “I told you it was all nonsense!"’

Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations, and whispered:  ’A lady’s way of telling the story!—­and excuseable to her:—­she had to Jonah the adjective.  What the poor fellow said was—­’ He murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to rightly emphasize his noun.

Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of masculine veracity in narration.  ‘A story for its native sauce piquante,’ he said.