“I know all you’re going to say,” he replied. “You mean to float these people, and you’ll do it. You’ll get ’em to State concerts, and you’ll get ’em to Marlborough House garden-parties, and you’ll get ’em to political houses, and you’ll ram ’em down all our throats, and take the princes to dine with ’em; I know all that; it’s always the same programme; and the he-beast will get a baronetcy, and the she-beast will get to Hatfield, and you’ll run them just as Barnum used to run his giants and dwarfs, and you’ll make a pot by it as Barnum did. Only leave me out of the thing, if you please.” “Why shouldn’t you be the sleeping partner?” said his sister jestingly, but with a side glance of her lovely eyes which had a timid and keen interrogation in it. “Nobody’d be the wiser, and your word has such weight.” “Don’t make that sort of suggestion, my dear, even in joke. Gerald has helped you; I am not Gerald. You’ve made him dance to your tune through a lot of mud, but you won’t make me. There are enough of the family in this shabby kind of business as it is.” “Oh, Ronald!----” “You see, Sourisette,” he added, “you are always telling me that I wear my clothes too long; you’ve often seen me in an old coat, in a shockingly old coat; but you never saw me in an ill-cut one. Well, I like my acquaintances to be like my clothes. They may be out at elbows, but I must have ’em well cut.” Lady Kenilworth gazed at her pocket-handkerchief for a few minutes in disturbed silence. “Is that the tone you mean to take about my new people?” she asked at last. “My dearest Sourisette, I don’t take any tone. These _richards_ from the Northwest are nothing to me. You are taking them up, and getting Carrie to take them up, because you mean to get lots of good things out of them. No one can possibly know ‘a bull-dozing boss’ from North Dakota for any other reason than to plunder him.” “Oh, Ronald! What coarse and odious things you say!” Her exclamation was beseeching and indignant; a little flush of color went over her fair cheeks. “You shouldn’t be so hard upon one,” she added. “Some poet has said that poverty gives us strange bed-fellows.” “We need never lie down on the bed; we can lie in our own straw.” “But if we have used up all our straw?” “Then we can go out of doors and sleep _à la belle étoile_.” “And the rural constable will pass by with his lanthorn, and wake us up, and run us in! Oh, my dear Ronald, you don’t know what it is to want a sovereign every moment. You’re unmarried, and you shoot with a keeper’s gun, and you yacht in an old wooden tub, and you lounge about all over the world with your places shut up, and your town-house let; what can you tell, what can you dream, of the straits Cocky and I are put to every single minute of our lives?”