11. Something of that sort was always happening--something in each country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her husband to remind her of the proprieties. In France, a cousin of van Tuiver’s had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau. The family was Catholic, of the very oldest and strictest, and the brother-in-law, a prelate of high degree, had invited the guests to be shown through his cathedral. “Imagine my bewilderment!” said Sylvia. “I thought I was going to meet a church dignitary, grave and reverent; but here was a wit, a man of the world. Such speeches you never heard! I was ravished by the grandeur of the building, and I said: ‘If I had seen this, I would have come to you to be married.’ ‘Madame is an American,’ he replied. ‘Come the next time!’ When I objected that I was not a Catholic, he said: ‘Your beauty is its own religion!’ When I protested that he would be doing me too great an honour, ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘the _honneur_ would be all to the church!’ And because I was shocked at all this, I was considered to be a provincial person!” Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you “never saw the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg”; where you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your stomach. They went for a week-end to “Hazelhurst,” the home of the Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in America, and who, in the son’s absence, claimed the right to repay the debt. The old lady sat at table with two fat poodle dogs in infants’ chairs, one on each side of her, feeding out of golden trays. There was a visiting curate, a frightened little man at the other side of one poodle; in an effort to be at ease he offered the wheezing creature a bit of bread. “Don’t feed my dogs!” snapped the old lady. “I don’t allow anybody to feed my dogs!” And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable Reginald was twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished. (“They feed them badly,” his mother had explained, “an’ the teachin’s no good either, but it’s a school for gentlemen.”) “Honestly,” said Sylvia, “he was the queerest little mannikin--like the tiny waiter’s assistants you see in hotels on the Continent. He wore his Eton suit, you understand--grown-up evening clothes minus the coat-tails, and a top hat. He sat at tea and chatted with the mincing graces of a cotillion-leader; you expected to find some of his hair gone when he took off his hat! He spoke of his brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. ‘The jolly rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have to work like dogs when we grow up!’ I asked what he’d do, and he said ‘I suppose there’s nothin’ but the church. It’s a beastly bore, but you do get a livin’ out of it.’