"You won't alter 'em, my dear fellow," replies Usk, "if you put yourself out about it ever so much. If you were to marry a savage out of Formosa, or an Esquimaux, she'd take kindly to the caviare and the kümmel before a week was out, if you brought her to Europe. Why, look at dogs,--you may keep 'em on biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if they once come to the dining-room they'll turn their noses up at a beef-steak if it isn't truffled!" "Dogs, at least, stop short of the kümmel," says Brandolin; "but if you were to put together the sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea, the brandy in the _chasse_ at dinner, which a fashionable woman takes in the course of the day (not counting any pick-me-up that she may require in her own room), the amount would be something enormous,--incredible! You would not believe the number of women who have cured me of an unhappy passion for them by letting me see what a lot they could drink." "You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never touches anything that I see, except tea." "Admirable person! I am ready to adore her. Tell me more about her. By the way, who is she?" "Oh, you must go to Dolly for biographies of her foreigners. I can't keep even their names in my head." "Foreigners! What an expression!" cries Dorothy Usk, in disdain. "Since steam effaced frontiers, nobody but insular people like ourselves ever use such a term. Nationalities are obliterated." She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff: she has a great many warm attachments to women who help to make her house attractive. "Nationalities are still discernible in different tobaccos," murmurs Brandolin. "The Havana won't acknowledge an equal in the Cavour." "Dolly don't know anything about her," continues Usk, clinging to the subject. "Oh, my dear!" cried his wife, shocked, "when she is the niece of the great Chancellor and her mother was a Princess Dourtza." "You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, with that unpleasant obstinacy characteristic of men when they talk to their wives. "You met her in Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she may have sent a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve to go there herself, for anything you can tell. One can never be sure of anything about foreigners." "How absurd you are, and how _insular_!" cries Dorothy Usk, again. "'Foreigners!' As if there were any foreigners in these days, when Europe is like one family!" "A family which, like most families, squabbles and scratches pretty often, then," says Usk,--which seems to his wife a reply too vulgar to be worthy of contradiction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by descent and alliance, are wholly irreproachable,--indeed, written in that _libro d'oro_, the "Almanach de Gotha," for all who choose to read.