“He rides well,” Philip answered, “and has a wonderful seat. I saw him on that bay mare of Wilder's in town the other afternoon, and I must say he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler.” “Oh, he's a gentleman,” the General repeated, with unshaken conviction: “a thoroughbred gentleman.” And he scanned Philip up and down with his keen grey eye as if internally reflecting that Philip's own right to criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle doubtful. “I should much like to make a captain of hussars of him. He'd be splendid as a leader of irregular horse; the very man for a scrimmage!” For the General's one idea when he saw a fine specimen of our common race was the Zulu's or the Red Indian's--what an admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his fellow-creatures! “He'd be better engaged so,” the Dean murmured reflectively, “than in diffusing these horrid revolutionary and atheistical doctrines.” For the Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression: and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean's crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic. “He's very like the duke, though,” General Claviger went on, after a moment's pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frida disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringas. “Very like the duke. And you saw he admitted some sort of relationship, though he didn't like to dwell upon it. You may be sure he's a by-blow of the family somehow. One of the Bertrams, perhaps the old duke who was out in the Crimea, may have formed an attachment for one of these Ingledew girls--the cobbler's sisters: I dare say they were no better in their conduct than they ought to be--and this may be the consequence.” “I'm afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful conversation,” the Dean put in, with a tone of professional disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the high-placed. “He didn't seem to set the example he ought to have done to his poorer brethren.” “Oh, he was a thorough old rip, the duke, if it comes to that,” General Claviger responded, twirling his white moustache. “And so's the present man--a rip of the first water. They're a regular bad lot, the Bertrams, root and stock. They never set an example of anything to anybody--bar horse-breeding,--as far as I'm aware; and even at that their trainers have always fairly cheated 'em.” “The present duke's a most exemplary churchman,” the Dean interposed, with Christian charity for a nobleman of position. “He gave us a couple of thousand last year for the cathedral restoration fund.”