“The less one thinks of it the better, I guess!” Lord Lambeth after a moment returned. “I think it’s tremendous”—this at least she kept up; and on another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he felt a little the burden of her earnestness. But he took it good-humouredly. “Do you want to buy up their leases?” “Well—have you got any ‘livings’?” she demanded as if the word were rich and rare. “Oh I say!” he cried. “Have _you_ got a pet clergyman looking out?” But she made him plead guilty to his having, in prospect, a castle; he confessed to but one. It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into a few pleasant facts about it and into pronouncing it really very jolly. Bessie listened with great interest, declaring she would give the world to see such a place. To which he charmingly made answer: “It would be awfully kind of you to come and stay there, you know.” It was not inconvenient to him meanwhile that Percy Beaumont hadn’t happened to hear him make this genial remark. Mr. Westgate, all this time, hadn’t, as they said at Newport, “come on.” His wife more than once announced that she expected him on the morrow; but on the morrow she wandered about a little, with a telegram in her jewelled fingers, pronouncing it too “fiendish” he should let his business so dreadfully absorb him that he could but platonically hope, as she expressed it, his two Englishmen were having a good time. “I must say,” said Mrs. Westgate, “that it’s no thanks to him if you are!” And she went on to explain, while she kept up that slow-paced circulation which enabled her well-adjusted skirts to display themselves so advantageously, that unfortunately in America there was no leisure-class and that the universal passionate surrender of the men to business-questions and business-questions only, as if they were the all in all of life, was a tide that would have to be stemmed. It was Lord Lambeth’s theory, freely propounded when the young men were together, that Percy was having a very good time with Mrs. Westgate and that under the pretext of meeting for the purpose of animated discussion they were indulging in practices that imparted a shade of hypocrisy to the lady’s regret for her husband’s absence. “I assure you we’re always discussing and differing,” Mr. Beaumont however asseverated. “She’s awfully argumentative. American ladies certainly don’t mind contradicting you flat. Upon my word I don’t think I was ever treated so by a woman before. We have ours ever so much more in hand. She’s so devilish positive.”