"Yes, I have often wondered myself. My father was an auctioneer, you know, and my mother's father was a butcher." Gerard Strobridge was extremely entertained. She was certainly a very wonderful product of such parentage. "May I look at them closely?" he asked. She showed not the least embarrassment; if he had been asking to see a piece of enamel, or a china vase she could not have been more detached about it. She held them out quite naturally, and he rose and took them in his own. Their touch was cool and firm, and every inch of his being tingled with pleasure. He examined them minutely finger by finger, stroking the rosy filbert nails in admiration, while an insane desire to clasp and kiss their owner grew in him. Katherine Bush was perfectly aware of this, and when she thought he had felt emotion enough for the occasion, she drew them back as naturally as she had given them. "I am always asking myself questions about such things," she remarked, in a tone of speculative matter-of-factness. "I am so often seeing contradictions since I have been here--My former conclusions are a little upset." "What were they?" He had returned to his chair. He was no novice to be carried away by his sensations, and he knew very well that to indulge them further at present would be very unwise, and perhaps check a most promising amusement. "I believed that birth and breeding gave fine ears and fine ankles and fine hands--as well as moral qualities." "And you have been disappointed?" "Yes, very--have not you?" "No, because I have had no illusions--one never can tell where a side cross comes in, or what will be the effect of overbreeding--that runs to enormities sometimes." "I suppose so--" "And have the moral qualities surprised you also?" "Oh, yes--more than the physical; I have seen and heard what I would have thought were common things even at Bindon's Green." He laughed again--If the crew who had attended the tableaux rehearsals could have heard her! "You are perfectly right--looked at in the abstract, I suppose we are rather a shoddy company nowadays." "There are individuals who come up to the measure, of course, but not all of them, as I had imagined. You must have opened the doors to quite ordinary people to have made such a mixture." "We have grown indifferent; we no longer care about a standard, I fear." "That is why you let all these Radicals be in power, perhaps--You have become effete like the nobles before the revolution in France, who could only die like gentlemen, but not live like men." Gerard Strobridge was startled. This from the granddaughter of a butcher of Bindon's Green! "She picks it all up from Seraphim, of course," he reflected presently. "And yet--look at her strange face!--it is a woman of parts from wherever it has come!" "That is an apt phrase--where did you find it--'die like gentleman, but not live like men'?"