“And yet, sir,” replied the General, “wondrous highly as you hold yourself, you are not yet grown to be the world. It's Peg's happiness--a matter of being within the pale, without which she would feel decided against and spurned. And remember this, sir, while you flourish with your defiances, that a bad law is none the less a law, with penalty in nowise to be mollified because of that badness at which you rail. Wherefore I deem, these drawing-room trinkets of a first weight in Peg's concerns; I shall know as much of them as I well may, and take my chance of falling in your graces.” After that, and somewhat in the broader manner of a jest, I would each day lay out to the General whatever of polite gaities took place the night before; and while I recited those present, and what they did or said, or failed to do or say, and particularly when such relation told for Peg, he would smoke, and listen, and exult, and on occasion comment like unto any grandmother gossip who still enjoys by second hands those scenes which long ago her years taught her to desert. These exploits of waxed floors and dinner tables, while the General might have neither art nor lot therein, drew me along with them--for all I loved them not--like a magnet. For one thing, I would behold how Peg fared; and then, the General would have me attend, to the purpose that he be given their story. It was at the Russian's I was called on to witness the iron steadiness of Peg--albeit I could have wished the Dutch jade, who offended, a man, that I might pinch his neck. You must know, then, how the Minister from the Netherlands was a bloated creature of beer and butter-tub proportions--a Herr Huygens, he was; and Frau Huygens, his lady--save the mark!--was as dropsical as he. The latter ungentlewoman would be a waddling, duck-built cabbage thing of fifty years; and of no little standing for a money-prudence and strict economy, since while as rich as that commerce of gin by which her spouse had builded up their fortunes, she owned celebration for but one frock--a most fantastic garment for color and flounce like the garb of a clown in a kirmess. At the Krudener dinner, your Frau Huygens, whose place was next to Peg's, would up and leave her chair immediately she was seated; and all with a lofty face as of one insulted, and following a great looking of Peg over through a spying glass. Spurred by this rudeness, Krudener directed a servant to remove the chair and plate and table furniture of that place. This was swiftly done; and next, to show his own feeling of the insolence offered under his roof, our Russian would have the plate and the rest, including the gilt chair, broken to pieces in one corner of the apartment and thrown upon the blaze in the vast fireplace.