“Dukes,” said Lady Surplice, “are not a fit subject for conversation. One should avoid being a Duke. They are low. Look, for instance, how they took up with that Amp woman! Look how that handsome but ill-mannered Duke of Mall made a fuss of that dreadful Mrs. Omroy Pont! And look at the Duke of Dear! One cannot know that man. He has actually been divorced time over again. England is getting simply flooded with ex-Duchesses of Dear. And while the Duke indulges his almost violent partiality for middle-class indiscretions, his only son has invented a rod with which he can catch smoked salmon. Is that patrician, is it even gentlemanly? Answer me, your Highness. Is this a time for silence? Then look at the Duchess of Sandal and Sand! She is in Paris now, and I hear she has lovers right and left and sits up every night at the _Jardin de Ma Sœur_ staring at people through an emerald monocle and drinking pink champagne through a straw. Is that just, is it reasonable, is it even decent? Monseigneur, what do you think? Is this a time for silence?” “Yes, please!” pleaded Fay Paradise. “For just look at what’s happening!” But it was Shelmerdene, said Dwight-Rankin, who had first seen the great doors opening. And Shelmerdene was very favourably impressed. “Captain Charity,” announced Talbot. Lady Surplice, said Dwight-Rankin, was also very favourably impressed. She cried: “My dear Captain Charity, how kind of you to come to a perfectly strange house! But you are so good-looking that I feel I ought to have known you all my life.” Now he who was called Captain Charity did not appear to be of those who suffer from nervousness. His lean presence, indeed, radiated a certain authority. And he smiled at Lady Surplice in a cold but charming way. But one can’t do better, said Dwight-Rankin, than take Shelmerdene’s swift first impression of the man. Shelmerdene said that he was a tall, lean, young man, dark and beautiful; his air was military, but with a pleasing suggestion of culture; and as he came towards the company he appeared to look at nobody but Guy de Travest, and always he smiled, Shelmerdene had told Dwight-Rankin, in a cold but charming way. “Haven’t we,” doubtfully said de Travest to the teeth of that faint smile, “met before somewhere?” One must imagine those two, said Dwight-Rankin, as making as brave-looking a pair of men as one could wish to see: the stranger, dark and beautiful, and Guy de Travest, quiet and yellow-fair: the lean dark dandy with the mocking mouth and the fair thunder-god of dandies with the frozen eyes. “I think not,” said Captain Charity, and he said: “But you are very like Michael.” “Michael?” quoth my lord. “And who, pray, is your Michael?”