Lord Lioncourt must have been about thirty, but he had the heated and broken complexion of a man who has taken more than is good for him in twice that number of years.  This was one of the wrongs nature had done him in apparent resentment of the social advantages he was born to, for he was rather abstemious, as Englishmen go.  He looked a very shy person till he spoke, and then you found that he was not in the least shy.  He looked so English that you would have expected a strong English accent of him, but his speech was more that of an American, without the nasality.  This was not apparently because he had been much in America; he was returning from his first visit to the States, which had been spent chiefly in the Territories; after a brief interval of Newport he had preferred the West; he liked rather to hunt than to be hunted, though even in the West his main business had been to kill time, which he found more plentiful there than other game.  The natives, everywhere, were much the same thing to him; if he distinguished it was in favor of those who did not suppose themselves cultivated.  If again he had a choice it was for the females; they seemed to him more amusing than the males, who struck him as having an exaggerated reputation for humor.  He did not care much for Clementina’s past, as he knew it from Mrs. Milray, and if it did not touch his fancy, it certainly did not offend his taste.  A real artistocracy is above social prejudice, when it will; he had known some of his order choose the mothers of their heirs from the music halls, and when it came to a question of distinctions among Americans, he could not feel them.  They might be richer or poorer; but they could not be more patrician or more plebeian.

The passengers, he told Clementina, were getting up, at this point of the ship’s run, an entertainment for the benefit of the seaman’s hospital in Liverpool, that well-known convention of ocean-travel, which is sure at some time or other, to enlist all the talent on board every English steamer in some sort of public appeal.  He was not very clear how he came to be on the committee for drumming up talent for the occasion; his distinction seemed to have been conferred by a popular vote in the smoking room, as nearly as he could make out; but here he was, and he was counting upon Miss Claxon to help him out.  He said Mrs. Milray had told him about that charming affair they had got up in the mountains, and he was sure they could have something of the kind again.  “Perhaps not a coaching party; that mightn’t be so easy to manage at sea.  But isn’t there something else—­some tableaux or something?  If we couldn’t have the months of the year we might have the points of the compass, and you could take your choice.”

He tried to get something out of the notion, but nothing came of it that Mrs. Milray thought possible.  She said, across her husband, on whose further side she had sunk into a chair, that they must have something very informal; everybody must do what they could, separately.  “I know you can do anything you like, Clementina.  Can’t you play something, or sing?” At Clementina’s look of utter denial, she added, desperately, “Or dance something?” A light came into the girl’s face at which she caught.  “I know you can dance something!  Why, of course!  Now, what is it?”