Lord Sandilands, whom I had never seen until that night, instantly reminded me of that scathing dictum of Swift’s: “A weak, diseased body, a meager countenance, and sallow complexion are the true marks of noble blood.” Gulliver, you will find, if you look the passage up, gave his horse friend an even more drastic explanation of an occasional lapse by the aristocracy into robustness of physique; but Lord Sandilands, judged by the Dean’s standard, was a genuine peer. Yet he was a harmless little creature. I fancy he received a mild shock every time his Juno-like daughter called him “father.” At any rate, I amused myself by studying the girl, and I came to the conclusion that had Karl scoured the earth he could not have found a more exact antithesis to Maggie Hutchinson than her successful rival, the Honorable Nora Cazenove. They had the common attributes of good looks, good style, and what passes current for good education among young ladies of twenty-three or thereabouts. In all else they differed. If I were seeking worthy tabernacles for merely intellectual concepts of what we mean when we speak of soul and body, I should choose those two girls as supplying the requisite shrines. Though my recollection of Maggie was not quite definite, I could recall her Madonna expression, the spirituality which diffused its mild beams over a grateful world from her brown eyes. Nora, on the other hand, was what her lineage proclaimed, a purchased standard of bodily excellence. Maggie could forget all, even life itself, in the exaltation of music, the passion of a song, the transient loveliness of a sunset, whereas Nora must be a fine equestrian, fond of good food and hearty exercise, a woman in whom the wonderful maternal instinct would be less divine than human. I am not blind to the lack of precision in that last distinction. Some day a man may be free to write as he thinks, provided always that he has honorable and useful intent, but that day is not yet. I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I made a rather bad break with the would-be laureate. “What would you have said,” he fiercely demanded, “if the Prime Minister told you that your latest volume of poems was a collection of turgid nonsense?” “I would have said that he was quite right,” I answered blithely, for a man can always run down his own work with safety. Then it dawned on me that the Prime Minister had expressed himself thus strongly, not on my book, but on the poet’s. “Of course,” I added, “it was quite evident that he had not read a line of your verse.” “Confound it, haven’t I just related to you how I found him in the summer-house, and compelled him to listen? yes, blocked up the only exit, until I recited to him the whole of my ode to ‘Eternity.’” “The subject was too vast for his intelligence.”