The young man's face, from its altitude of six-feet-something, beamed responsively down upon her. "Oh," he laughed, "you mustn't give me too much credit. To be English nowadays is so ingloriously easy--since foreign lands have become merely the wider suburbs of London." Lady Blanchemain's eyes lighted approvingly. Afterwards she looked half serious. "True," she discriminated, "London has spread pretty well over the whole of Europe; but England, thanks be to goodness, still remains mercifully small." "Yes," agreed the young man, though with a lilt of dubiety, and a frown of excogitation, as if he weren't sure that he had quite caught her drift. "The mercy of it is," she smilingly pointed out, "that English folk, decent ones, have no need to fight shy of each other when they meet as strangers. We all know more or less about each other by hearsay, or about each other's people; and we're all pretty sure to have some common acquaintances. The smallness of England makes for sociability and confidence." "It ought to, one would think," the young man admitted. "But does it, in fact? It had somehow got stuck in my head that English folk, meeting as strangers, were rather apt to glare. We're most of us in such a funk, you see, lest, if we treat a stranger with civility, he should turn out not to be a duke." "Oh," cried Lady Blanchemain, with merriment, "you forget that I said _decent_. I meant, of course, folk who _are_ dukes. We're all dukes--or bagmen." The young man chuckled; but in a minute he pulled a long face, and made big, ominous eyes. "I feel I ought to warn you," he said in a portentous voice, "that some of us are mere marquises--of the house of Carabas." Lady Blanchemain, her whole expansive person, simmered with enjoyment. "Bless you," she cried, "those are the ducalest, for marquises--of the house of Carabas--are men of dash and spirit, born to bear everything before them, and to marry the King's daughter." With that, she had a moment of abstraction. Again, her eyeglass up, she glanced round the walls--hung, in this octagonal room, with dim-coloured portraits of women, all in wonderful toilets, with wonderful hair and head-gear, all wonderfully young and pleased with things, and all four centuries dead. They caused her a little feeling of uneasiness, they were so dead and silent, and yet somehow, in their fixed postures, with their unblinking eyes, their unvarying smiles, so--as it seemed to her--so watchful, so intent; and it was a relief to turn from them to the window, to the picture framed by the window of warm, breathing, heedless nature. But all the while, in her interior mind, she was busy with the man before her. "He looks," she considered, "tall as he is, and with his radiant blondeur--with the gold in his hair and beard, and the sea-blue in his eyes--he looks like a hero out of some old Norse saga. He looks like-what's his name?--like Odin. I must really compel him to explain himself."