something in his point of view about it all, for I once heard a man with a lot of letters behind his name say that when a country gives up a limb it also gives up its body; but he may have been wrong, for after all France is still France! "But you would have adored my old man, Dikran, just as I did. He treated life, and men, and women with all that etiquette which you so admire, he was simply bristling with etiquette--a deal too much of it for my taste, for I was only seventeen then and liked my freedom like any other Englander.... But I'm finding it very difficult to describe the man he was, my dear, for in our slovenly sort of English we've got used to describing a person by saying he is like another person, and I can't do that in this case because he belongs as much to a past age as Hannibal, and there isn't any one like him now. And even when he was alive there were very few--two or three old men as fierce and unyielding and vital as himself, who used to come and dine, and say pretty things to little me who sat at the end of the table with very large eyes and fast-beating heart, wondering why they weren't all leading Cabinets and squashing revolutions, for they seemed to know the secrets of every secret cabal and camarilla in Europe. "Yes, my old guardian was a remnant of an empire--but what a remnant! Such a fierce-looking little man he was, with pale, steel-blue eyes which pierced into you from under a precipice of a forehead, a bristling Second Empire moustache, and thin bloodless lips which parted before the most exquisite French I've ever heard; I can scarcely bear it when you say I talk French divinely, for I know how pitiful mine is compared to the real thing, as done by that old man and Sarah Bernhardt, for they were very old friends and she used often to come and lunch with us. "He talked well, too, and all the better for having something to say, as well he might have since he had been everything and known every one worth knowing of his time--ministers, and rebels, and artists, and all the best-known prostitutes of the day; but they did those things better then, Dikran. In fact, more as an excuse for getting away from a parvenu Paris than from any Bonapartist feelings, for he was always an Orleanist, I think he had represented Louis Napoleon at every city which could run to an Embassy from London to Pekin; from where he brought back that ivory Buddha which is on my writing-table, and which has an inscription in ancient Chinese saying that every man is his own god, but that Buddha is every man's God, which goes a long way to prove that the wisdom of the East wasn't as wise as all that, after all. "But you are getting restless," she said suddenly. "You probably want to open the tea-basket to see what's inside, or you've just seen a water rat----"