"A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. He likes to ticket his relations and connections with well-chosen descriptions. "All good looks and soft sawder. Women like that sort of thing----" "Of course we like good manners, though they are not your weakness," interrupts his wife, with acerbity. "Alan has the manners of a man who respects women: that may seem very tame to you and your friend Brandolin, but in these days it has at least the charm of novelty." "Respects women!" Usk is unable to restrain his hilarity. "My dear Dolly, you're not a chicken: you can't mean that you don't know that Gervase----" "I know that he is well-bred. You were so once, but it is a very long time ago," replies his wife, with cutting sententiousness, and with that unkind reply she leaves him. As if she did not understand men better than he, she thinks, contemptuously. He may understand dogs and horses, and deer and partridges, but about human nature he knows no more than the old man at the lodge gates. "Surely she can't be soft on Gervase herself?" her husband reflects, with a sensation of amusement; "it would be too funny, after running so straight all these years, and just as her daughters are growing up; but they often are like that." He is not sure whether the idea diverts or irritates him, but he knows that he has always detested Gervase, such a coxcomb and such a humbug as the fellow is! "Respect women, good Lord!" ejaculates Usk in his solitude. "To be sure," adds that honest gentleman in his own mind, "there are very few of 'em who would thank you to respect 'em nowadays." "Gervase will be here by dinner," he says in the course of the day to Princess Sabaroff. "Indeed," she replies, with indifference. "Who is he?" "A friend of my wife's; at least, a cousin. I thought you might know him; he was some time in Russia." "No,"--and there is a coldness in the negative disproportioned to so simple a denial,--"I do not think so. I do not remember such a name. Who is he?" "A person who is expected to be great in foreign affairs some day or other," says Brandolin. "He will have one qualification rare in an English foreign minister,--daily growing rarer, thanks to the imbecilities of examinations: he knows how to bow and he knows what to say." "A friend of yours?" "Oh, no; an acquaintance. He thinks very ill of me." "Why?" "Because I do nothing for my country. He thinks he does a great deal when he has fomented a quarrel or received a decoration." "That is not generous. The world owes much to diplomatists: it will know how much in a few years, when it will be governed by clerks controlled by telephones." "That is true: I stand corrected. But Gervase and I have few sympathies: none, indeed, except politically, and even there we differ,--his is the Toryism of Peel, mine is the Toryism of the late Lord Derby: there are leagues between the two." "I know: the one is opportunism; the other is optimate-ism."