I have called on the Vane-Corduroys, who have leased Shotover Park from the De Mantons. Poor Lady de Manton cried when she left it, and is living in a boarding-house on the Parade at Weston-super-mare; old Lord de Manton has gone up to London, where he thinks he can get a Chairmanship of a City Company for the sake of his name. The Honourable Agatha has gone out to South Africa on a hospital ship, and her brother, the Honourable de Montgomery de Manton, whom, you remember, we met once on the Promenade at Cannes, and I wouldn't let you bow to him because he was walking with such an impossible woman, has joined the Imperial Yeomanry as a trooper. The family seems quite broken up; it is rather a pity, as they had been at Shotover since the Conquest. Mrs. Blaine says it is all due to Kaffirs; that Lord de Manton would set up as a stockbroker, and you know what a mess he got the lunatic asylum accounts into the year he was treasurer. But, as Mrs. Blaine says, he will probably be back at Shotover within a year, for he is just the sort of man they like to get on directorates in London, and that is such a paying profession now-a-days. He told Lady Beatrice that if worse became worst with him he knew the Colonial Office would give him an island to govern. He didn't seem very depressed when he left, but Lady de Manton was completely _bouleversée_. Tom told me that she had written to his mother to say that Weston-super-mare was intolerable; they gave her Brussels sprouts and boiled beef six days running; she wanted Lady Beatrice to help her get the post of stewardess on one of the new West Indian line steamers to Jamaica; she makes a point of the fact that she was never sick when crossing the Channel. She seems willing to do anything till poor Lord de Manton "arrives." {_The Vane-Corduroys_} How I digress! I started to tell you of the Vane-Corduroys, and I shunted off to the De Mantons; you will think me as garrulous as an old maid.