Of course I saw what she meant about the nurse the moment I had spoken, but it is inexcusable to laugh at a man because he does not immediately follow the sense (or rather the senselessness) of a childishly skipping conversation. I am as ready as any one to laugh at really amusing phrases or incidents, but being neither a phrase nor an incident myself I do not see why I should be laughed at. Surely it is unworthy of grown men and women to laugh at each other in the way silly children do? It is ruin to the graces of social intercourse, to the courtliness that should uninterruptedly distinguish the well-born. But there was a childish spirit pervading the whole party (with the exception of myself) that seemed to increase as the days went by, a spirit of unreasoning glee and mischievousness which I believe is characteristic of very young and very healthy children. Even Edelgard was daily becoming more calf-like, as we say, daily descending nearer to the level occupied at first only by the two nondescripts, that level at which you begin to play idiotic and heating games like the one the English call Blind Man’s Buff (an obviously foolish name, for what is buff?) and which we so much more sensibly call Blind Cow. Therefore I, having no intention at my age and in my position of joining in puerilities or even of seeming to countenance them by my presence, said abruptly, “I will smoke”--and strode away to do it. One of the ladies called after me to inquire if I were not going to church with them, but I pretended not to hear and strode on toward the shelter of the hedge, giving Jellaby as I passed him such a look as would have caused any one not overgrown with the leather substitute for skin peculiar to persons who set order, morals, and religion at defiance, to creep confounded into his tent and stay there till his face was ready and his collar on. He, however, called out with the geniality born of brazenness, that it was a jolly morning; of which, of course, I took no notice. In the dry ditch beneath the hedge on the east side of the field sat Lord Sigismund beside his _batterie de cuisine_, watching over, with unaccountable and certainly misplaced kindness, the porridge and the coffee that were presently to be Jellaby’s. While he watched he smoked his pipe, stroked his dog, and hummed snatches of what I supposed were psalms with the pleasant humming of the good, the happy, and the well-born. Near him lay Menzies-Legh, his dark and sinister face bent over a book. He nodded briefly in response to my lifted hat and morning salutation, while Lord Sigismund, full as ever of the graciousness of noble birth, asked me if I had had a good night. “A good night, and an excellent breakfast, thanks to you, Lord Sidge,” I replied; the touch of playfulness contained in the shortened name lightening the courteous correctness of my bow as I arranged myself next to him in the ditch.