“Yes; ever since you played to us at Chartries she has been trying to learn the ‘Merry Peasant,’” she said. “She is not getting on very well; but art is long, is it not. So is life. Too long, I think, sometimes. But, my dear, the rest of them! They talk about fiscal problems and what they’ve shot. Even Frank appears to be vaguely interested in free trade or free food or free drinks or something, which is deplorable of him. I expect him here immediately. My bedroom is the only place where one can be free from those intolerable bores. There are three, three cabinet ministers in the house! Really, politics ought to be considered a dangerous habit, like morphia. In fact, there is a very great resemblance between them. They are both drugs that send me to sleep, and the habit grows on one. You have to take more and more, and the result is death of the intellect, which is quite as lamentable as death of the body, and renders you far more tiresome to other people. For, after all, when one’s body is dead one is put away. But people whose intellect is dead are not put away at all; they pervade society. There is no one in the world so lost as the intellectually lost. How big hell must be! Talking of that, how is your father? What a bear!” Martin had settled himself in a rose-coloured chair, and gave a great shout of laughter, suddenly checked. “Quite well,” he said. “He always is.” “Yes, that is so like him,” said she. “But, really, have you any strain of insanity in your very extraordinary family? My darlings, did I kick you? Oh, Sahara, naughty! All that book, and I hadn’t read it. _Commandez du thé, Hortense._ So convenient, she doesn’t know a word of English. Did you ever see such a murderish-looking woman? But she can make hats out of a tooth-brush and some waste-paper. Some day she will kill me for my diamonds, and find out afterwards that they are paste. Then she will be sorry, and so shall I. Do attend, monster. Can you tell me why Helen, head over ears in love with him,--that was why I brought them together,--should behave like that? Shutting herself up with the bear and that dreadful aunt of yours who plays Patience. And Frank thinks, in some confused way, that it is so beautiful. He looks so funny when Helen’s name is mentioned, rather like a widower, who hears a hymn-tune in four sharps on Sunday evening. So frightfully old-fashioned, that sort of thing. Those two find a sort of spiritual thrill in standing a hundred miles apart and shouting ‘Caro mio! O Carissima!’ to each other at the tops of their voices. I can’t bear that sort of Platonic love. Yes, you Challoners are all mad. If Becky Sharp lived with Savonarola in a grand piano, you would find a little Challoner crying on the drawing-room carpet one morning.” “Why Becky Sharp?” he inquired, parenthetically. “Only to add a little _joie-de-vivre_. No imputation on your morals.”