forget what anecdote about some outrageous piece of insolence played off on some new intruder into the titled class, she suddenly started as if something had stung her, and her eyes glared like a tiger's; then, catching me by the hand, she said, 'Don't tell me these things; they pain me more to hear than real, downright calamities!' That was enough for _me_. I saw her cards, Paul, and I played through them!” Classon heaved a deep sigh, and was silent. “What are you sighing over, Paul?” asked Davis, half morosely. “I was just sorrowing to myself to think how little all her pluck will avail her.” “Stuff and nonsense, sir! It is the very thing to depend on in the struggle.” “Ay, if there were a struggle, Kit, but that is exactly what there will not be. You, for instance, go into Brookes's to-morrow, you have been duly elected. It was a wet day, only a few at the ballot, and somehow you got in. Well, you are, to all intents, as much a member as his Grace there, or the noble Marquis. There's no commotion, no stir when you enter the room. The men at their newspapers look up, perhaps, but they read away immediately with only increased attention; the group at the window talks on too; the only thing noticeable is that nobody talks to _you_. If you ask for the 'Globe' or the 'Chronicle,' when the reader shall have finished, he politely hands it at once, and goes away.” “If he did, I'd follow him--” “What for?--to ask an explanation where there had been no offence? To make yourself at once notorious in the worst of all possible ways? There's nothing so universally detested as the man that makes a 'row;' witness the horror all well-bred people feel at associating with Americans, they're never sure how it's to end. Now, if all these considerations have their weight with men, imagine how they mast be regarded by women, fifty times more exacting as they are in all the exigencies of station, and whose freemasonry is a hundred times more exclusive.” “That's all rot!” broke in Davis, his passion the more violent as the arguments of the other seemed so difficult to answer. “You think to puzzle _me_ by talking of all these grand people and their ways as if they weren't all men and women. That they are, and a rum lot, too, some of them! Come,” cried Davis, suddenly, as though a happy thought had just flashed across his mind, “it was the turn of a straw one day, by your own account, that you were not a bishop. Now, I 'd like to know, if that lucky event had really taken place, wouldn't you have been the same Holy Paul Classon that sits there?” “Perhaps not, entirely,” said Classon, in his oiliest of voices. “I trust that I should, in ascending to that exalted station, have cast off the slough of an inferior existence, and carried up little of my former self except the friendships of my early years.” “Do you fancy, Master Paul, that gammon like this can impose upon a man of my sort?”