‘Stuff and nonsense!’ retorted Lady Firmanence. ‘He wants a good managing housekeeper with a keen eye for the butcher’s bill and a genius for economy. As for intellect--pray, Saxonstowe, don’t foster the foolish notion that poets are intellectual. Don’t you know that all genius is lopsided? Your poet has all his brain-power in one little cell--there may be a gold-mine there, but the rest of him is usually weak even to childishness. And the great need of the weak man is the strong woman.’ Saxonstowe’s silence was a delicate and flattering compliment to Lady Firmanence’s perspicacity. CHAPTER XIII Lady Firmanence’s observations upon the family history of Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel sent Lord Saxonstowe to their house at seven o’clock the following evening with feelings of pleasant curiosity. He had been out of the world--as that phrase is known by people whose chief idea of life is to live in social ant-heaps--long enough to enjoy a renewed acquaintance with it, and since his return to England had found a hitherto untasted pleasure in studying the manners and customs of his fellow-subjects. He remembered little about them as they had presented themselves to him before his departure for the East, for he was then young and unlicked: the five years of comparative solitude which he had spent in the deserts and waste places of the earth, only enlivened by the doubtful company of Kirghese, Tartars, and children of nature, had lifted him upon an eminence from whence he might view civilised humanity with a critical eye. So far everything had amused him--it seemed to him that never had life seemed so small and ignoble, so mean and trifling, as here where the men and women were as puppets pulled by strings which fate had attached to most capricious fingers. Like all the men who come back from the deserts and the mountains, he gazed on the whirling life around him with a feeling that was half pity, half contempt. The antics of the puppets made him wonder, and in the wonder he found amusement.