‘Certainly not,’ Tom Dupuy continued maliciously. ‘People in England don’t understand these things at all as we do.—Why, Mr Noel, you mayn’t be aware of it, but even among the highest English aristocracy there are an awful lot of regular coloured people, out-and-out mulattoes. West Indian heiresses in the old days used to go home—brown girls, or at anyrate young women with a touch of the tar-brush—daughters of governors and so forth, on the wrong side of the house—you understand’—Mr Tom Dupuy accompanied these last words with an upward and backward jerk of his left thumb, supplemented by a peculiarly ugly grimace, intended to be facetious—‘the sort of trash no decent young fellow over here would have so much as touched with a pair of tongs (in the way of marrying ’em, I mean); and when they got across to England, were snapped up at once by dukes and marquises, whose descendants, after all, though they may be lords, are really nothing better, you see, than common brown people!’ He spoke snappishly, but Harry only looked across at him in mild wonder. On the calm and unquestioning pride of a Lincolnshire Noel, remarks such as these fell flat and pointless. If a Noel had chosen to marry a kitchen-maid, according to their simple old-fashioned faith, he would have ennobled her at once, and lifted her up into his own exalted sphere of life and action. Her children after her would have been Lincolnshire Noels, the equals of any duke or marquis in the United Kingdom. So Harry only smiled benignly, and answered in his easy off-hand manner: ‘By Jove, I shouldn’t wonder at all if that were really the case now. One reads in Thackeray, you know, so much about the wealthy West Indian heiresses, with suspiciously curly hair, who used to swarm in London in the old slavery days. But of course, Mr Dupuy, it’s a well-known fact that all our good families have been awfully recruited by actresses and so forth. I believe some statistical fellow or other has written a book to show that if it weren’t for the actresses, the peerage and baronetage would all have died out long ago, of pure inanition. I daresay the West Indian heiresses, with the frizzy hair, helped to fulfil the same good and useful purpose, by bringing an infusion of fresh blood every now and then into our old families.’ And Harry ran his hand carelessly through his own copious curling black locks, in perfect unconsciousness of the absurdly malapropos nature of that instinctive action at that particular moment. His calm sense of utter superiority—that innate belief so difficult to shake, even on the most rational grounds, in most well-born and well-bred Englishmen—kept him even from suspecting the real drift of Tom Dupuy’s reiterated innuendoes. ‘You came out to Barbadoes to look after some property of your father’s, I believe?’ Mr Dupuy put in, anxious to turn the current of the conversation from this very dangerous and fitful channel.