"Contented! By Jove, who should be, when England's going to the dogs as fast as she can?" "In every period of your history," says the princess, "your country is always described as going headlong to ruin; and yet she has not gone there yet, and she has not done ill." "'Our constitution is established on a mere equipoise, with dark precipices and deep waters all around it.' So said Burke," replies Brandolin. "At the present moment everybody has forgotten the delicacy of this nice equipoise, and one day or other it will lose its balance and topple over into the deep waters, and be engulfed. Myself, I confess I do not think that time is very distant." "I hope it is; I am very much attached to England," replies the Princess Xenia, gravely, "and to naughty English boys," she adds, passing her hand over the shining locks of the Babe. "She must be in love with an Englishman," thinks Brandolin, with the one-sided construction which a man is always ready to place on the words of a woman. "Must we go in-doors?" he asks, regretfully, as she is moving towards the house. "It is so pleasant in these quaint green arbors. To be under a roof on such a summer afternoon as this, is to fly in the face of a merciful Creator with greater ingratitude than Usk's ingratitude to Inigo Jones." "But I have scarcely seen my hostess," says Madame Sabaroff; nevertheless, she resigns herself to a seat in a yew-tree cut like a helmet. There are all manner of delightful old-fashioned flowers, such flowers as Disraeli gave to the garden of Corisande, growing near in groups encircled by clipped box-edging. Those disciples of Pallas Athene who render the happy lives of the Surrenden children occasionally a burden to them seize at that moment on their prey and bear them off to the school-room. The Babe goes to his doom sullenly; he would be tearful, only that were too unmanly. "Why do you let those innocents be tortured, George?" asks Brandolin. "Books should, like business, entertain the day," replies Usk: "so you said, at least, just now. Their governesses are of the same opinion." "That is not the way to make them love books, to shut them up against their wills on a summer afternoon." "How will you educate your children when you have 'em, then?"