’That’s the man.  But he hasn’t troubled the Pytchley for the last eight years.  There was a time when he was the last thing in smartness in the German court—­officer in the Guards, ancient family, rich, darned clever—­all the fixings.  Kaiser liked him, and it’s easy to see why.  I guess a man who had as many personalities as the Graf was amusing after-dinner company.  Specially among the Germans, who in my experience don’t excel in the lighter vein.  Anyway, he was William’s white-headed boy, and there wasn’t a mother with a daughter who wasn’t out gunning for Otto von Schwabing.  He was about as popular in London and Noo York—­and in Paris, too.  Ask Sir Walter about him, Dick.  He says he had twice the brains of Kuhlmann, and better manners than the Austrian fellow he used to yarn about . . .  Well, one day there came an almighty court scandal, and the bottom dropped out of the Graf’s World.  It was a pretty beastly story, and I don’t gather that Schwabing was as deep in it as some others.  But the trouble was that those others had to be shielded at all costs, and Schwabing was made the scapegoat.  His name came out in the papers and he had to go .’

‘What was the case called?’ I asked.

Blenkiron mentioned a name, and I knew why the word Schwabiog was familiar.  I had read the story long ago in Rhodesia.

‘It was some smash,’ Blenkiron went on.  ’He was drummed out of the Guards, out of the clubs, out of the country . . .  Now, how would you have felt, Dick, if you had been the Graf?  Your life and work and happiness crossed out, and all to save a mangy princeling.  “Bitter as hell,” you say.  Hungering for a chance to put it across the lot that had outed you?  You wouldn’t rest till you had William sobbing on his knees asking your pardon, and you not thinking of granting it?  That’s the way you’d feel, but that wasn’t the Graf’s way, and what’s more it isn’t the German way.  He went into exile hating humanity, and with a heart all poison and snakes, but itching to get back.  And I’ll tell you why.  It’s because his kind of German hasn’t got any other home on this earth.  Oh, yes, I know there’s stacks of good old Teutons come and squat in our little country and turn into fine Americans.  You can do a lot with them if you catch them young and teach them the Declaration of Independence and make them study our Sunday papers.  But you can’t deny there’s something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you’ve civilized them.  They’re a pecooliar people, a darned pecooliar people, else they wouldn’t staff all the menial and indecent occupations on the globe.  But that pecooliarity, which is only skin-deep in the working Boche, is in the bone of the grandee.  Your German aristocracy can’t consort on terms of equality with any other Upper Ten Thousand.  They swagger and bluff about the world, but they know very well that the world’s sniggering at them.  They’re like a boss from Salt Creek Gully who’s made his pile and bought a dress suit and dropped into