And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son of the family, home from Eton on vacation.  The Honourable Reginald was twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished.  ("They feed them badly,” his mother had explained, “an’ the teachin’s no good either, but it’s a school for gentlemen.”) “Honestly,” said Sylvia, “he was the queerest little mannikin—­like the tiny waiter’s assistants you see in hotels on the Continent.  He wore his Eton suit, you understand—­grown-up evening clothes minus the coat-tails, and a top hat.  He sat at tea and chatted with the mincing graces of a cotillion-leader; you expected to find some of his hair gone when he took off his hat!  He spoke of his brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere.  ’The jolly rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have to work like dogs when we grow up!’ I asked what he’d do, and he said ‘I suppose there’s nothin’ but the church.  It’s a beastly bore, but you do get a livin’ out of it.’

“That was too much for me,” said Sylvia.  “I proceeded to tell the poor, blasé infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I had caught half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them, when we were so small that our little fat legs stuck out horizontally; how we had given ourselves convulsions in the green apple orchard, and had to be spanked every day before we had our hair combed.  I told how we heard a war-story about a “train of gunpowder,” and proceeded to lay such a train about the attic of Castleman Hall, and set fire to it.  I might have spent the afternoon teaching the future churchman how to be a boy, if I hadn’t suddenly caught a glimpse of my husband’s face!”

12.  I did not hear these stories all at once.  I have put them together here because they make a little picture of her honeymoon, and also because they show how, without meaning it, she was giving me an account of her husband.

There had been even fewer adventures in the life of young Douglas van Tuiver than in the life of the Honourable Reginald Annersley.  When one heard the details of the up-bringing of this “millionaire baby,” one was able to forgive him for being self-centred.  He had grown into a man who lived to fulfil his social duties, and he had taken to wife a girl who was reckless, high-spirited, with a streak of almost savage pride in her.

Sylvia’s was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the world.  It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of Castleman County.  If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver; you would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and transfixed with a trident of mockery and scorn.  That was what she had done in her husband-hunt.  The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough to realise this, and to trust her prowess against other beasts in the social jungle.