"Yes, grouse," he said, after dinner. "If anything better can be invented I'll go and do it. American bears are a myth. You may get one in three years, and, as far as I can hear, very poor fun it is when you get it. Lions are a grind. Elephants are as big as a hay-stack. Pig-sticking may be very well, but you've got to go to India, and if you're a poor Foreign Office clerk you haven't got either the time or the money." "You speak as though killing something were a necessity," said Roden. "So it is, unless somebody can invent something better. I hate races, where a fellow has nothing to do with himself when he can't afford to bet. I don't mean to take to cards for the next ten years. I have never been up in a balloon. Spooning is good fun, but it comes to an end so soon one way or another. Girls are so wide-awake that they won't spoon for nothing. Upon the whole I don't see what a fellow is to do unless he kills something." "You won't have much to kill on board the yacht," said Roden. "Fishing without end in Iceland and Norway! I knew a man who killed a ton of trout out of an Iceland lake. He had to pack himself up very closely in tight-fitting nets, or the midges would have eaten him. And the skin came off his nose and ears from the sun. But he liked that rather than not, and he killed his ton of trout." "Who weighed them?" asked Hampstead. "How well you may know a Utilitarian by the nature of his questions! If a man doesn't kill his ton all out, he can say he did, which is the next best thing to it." "Are you taking close-packing nets with you?" Roden asked. "Well, no. Hampstead would be too impatient. And the _Free Trader_ isn't big enough to bring away the fish. But I don't mind betting a sovereign that I kill something every day I'm out,--barring Sundays." Not a word was said about Lady Frances, although there were a few moments in which Roden and Lord Hampstead were alone together. Roden had made up his mind that he would ask no questions unless the subject were mentioned, and did not even allude to any of the family; but he learnt in the course of the evening that the Marquis had come back from Germany with the intention of attending to his Parliamentary duties during the remainder of the Session. "He's going to turn us all out," said Vivian, "on the County Franchise, I suppose." "I'm afraid my father is not so keen about County Franchise as he used to be, though I hope he will be one of the few to support it in the House of Lords if the House of Commons ever dares to pass it."