Edgar felt regretful. He had debated with himself that question of pink or no pink; and the thought of Daphne’s possible ridicule had turned the scale in favour of sober black; and now she told him he would have looked better in the more distinctive garb. And there were fellows who could hardly jump a drain-pipe showing off in their Poole or Smallpage coats, and giving themselves Nimrod airs which imposed upon the sweet simplicity of their partners. The room was a noble room, long and lofty, divided from a spacious antechamber by a wide square doorway, supported by classic pillars. Over this doorway was the open gallery for the band. The ball-room was lighted by a large central chandelier, and two sun-burners in the ceiling; while from lyre-shaped medallions on the walls projected modern gas brackets in imitation of old-fashioned girandoles of the wax-candle period. There were four full length portraits on the walls: the Duke of Dorset, by Romney; a portrait of Queen Anne, as uninteresting as that harmless lady was in the flesh. The remaining two pictures had to do with the local divinity. One was Gainsborough’s portrait of Garrick, leaning against the bust of Shakespeare; the other was the poet seated, in his habit as he lived, by Wilson. ‘You see,’ said Gerald, close behind Daphne, ‘there is the Warwickshire idol. One can’t get away from him. Why can these bucolics worship nothing but the intellectual emanation of their soil? Why not a little homage to muscular Christianity, in the person of Guy, Earl of Warwick, a paladin of the first water, a man who rescued damsels, and fought with giants and dun cows, and was strong and brave, and faithful, pious, self-sacrificing, devoted in every act of his life? There is a hero worthy of worship. Yet you all ignore him, and bow down before this golden calf of a dramatist, who sued his friend for a twopenny loan, and left the wife of his bosom a second-best bedstead—a paltry fellow beside Guy, the hero-hermit, living on bread and water, and only revealing himself at his death to the wife he adored.’ ‘Guy was a very nice person, if one could quite believe in the giant and the dun cow,’ said Daphne. ‘I believe implicitly in Colbrand the giant,’ answered Gerald, ‘but I own I have never been able to swallow the monster cow; and I am all the more inclined to repudiate her because her bones were on view at Warwick in Shakespeare’s time.’ ‘And it was very sweet of him to end his days so quietly in the hermit’s cave at Guy’s Cliff,’ pursued Daphne, who was well versed in all Warwickshire lore, chiefly by oral instruction from Edgar, ‘and to take alms from his own wife every morning, as one of the thirteen beggars she was in the habit of relieving; though I have never quite understood why he did it. But in spite of all these grand acts of Guy’s we know nothing of the man himself, while Shakespeare is like one’s brother. He has sounded the deep of every mind, and has given us the treasures of his own.’