She summoned her smile and nodded.

He spoke aside to Lady Grace:  ’The dear soul wants time to compose herself after a grand surprise.’

She replied:  ‘I think I could soon be reconciled.  How much land?’

’In treaty for some hundred and eighty or ninety acres . . . in all at present three hundred and seventy, including plantations, lake, outhouses.’

’Large enough; land paying as it does—­that is, not paying.  We shall be having to gamble in the City systematically for subsistence.’

‘You will not so much as jest on the subject.’

Coming from such a man, that was clear sky thunder.  The lady played it off in a shadowy pout and shrug while taking a stamp of his masterfulness, not so volatile.

She said to Nataly:  ’Our place in Worcestershire is about half the size, if as much.  Large enough when we’re not crowded out with gout and can open to no one.  Some day you will visit us, I hope.’

‘You we count on here, Lady Grace.’

It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this well-bred woman; and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes us to speculate.  The lady resumed:  ’I value the favour.  We’re in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down there.  We want enlivening.  If we had your set of musicians and talkers!’

Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort of a compliment to a person she measured.  Lady Grace also was an amiable hostile reviewer.  Each could see, to have cited in the other, defects common to the lower species of the race, admitting a superior personal quality or two; which might be pleaded in extenuation; and if the apology proved too effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it, under an implied appeal to benevolence.  When we have not a liking for the creature whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we are minutely just.

During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding, emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not perpetually at the gape in laudation.  Colney was heard to say:  ’No doubt:  the German is the race the least mixed in Europe:  it might challenge aboriginals for that.  Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia for knowledge, the sausage for nutrition!  How would you explain it?’

Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to the insensately infantile interrogation.

He in turn was presently heard.

’But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin.  I must beg of you you write it down.  It is orally incomprehensible to Continentals.’

‘We are Islanders!’ Colney shrugged in languishment.

‘Oh, you do great things . . .’  Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness, making his voice a musical intimation of the smallness of the things.

‘We build great houses, to employ our bricks’