“You surprise me,” replied the duke. “I sold Seeton Pastures to a grazier last year; but the obligation to be ‘nice’ to the purchaser was not in the contract. The sale of Vale Royal was a great disgrace to Roxhall, for his affairs were by no means in such a state as to necessitate or excuse it. But whether his loss or his gain, the sale is certainly his affair; and no one else’s.” “Oh, you look at things so--so--stiffly,” said his daughter-in-law. “We don’t, you know.” “I am aware that you do not,” said Otterbourne with significance; and dropped the subject. When Clare Courcy, lovely as a dream, had been first married to his son, the duke, fascinated out of his better judgment, had admired and been inclined to love his daughter-in-law. Even now he could not be wholly insensible always to the witchery of the prettiest woman in England. He knew her worthlessness; he was aware that his son, bad as he had been before, had become ten times worse in every way since his marriage; he could never see the little black-eyed, fair-haired cherubs of the Kenilworth nurseries without a sigh and a curse in his own thoughts; but she at certain moments fascinated him still. “I may send the bills in to Masters, I suppose?” she asked. Colonel Masters was the duke’s agent, a silent, conscientious ex-soldier entirely insensible to her own attractions. “Certainly. He has my authority to discharge them all. You seem to me to have been more extravagant than usual in your orders.” He looked around him as he spoke; they were standing in a long gallery at the head of the grand staircase. Flowers--flowers--flowers, met the eye in every direction, and the various devices which held the electric lights were concealed on the walls by millions of roses and orchids. “I suppose it is an old-fashioned idea,” said Otterbourne; “but I think a gentleman’s house should be thought good enough for his friends, even for his future sovereigns, without all this dressing-up and disguising. Modern fashions are extremely snobbish.” “They certainly are; there I quite agree with you,” said his daughter-in-law, and meant what she said. “A fine house like this wants no dressing-up. But we must do as other people do, or look odd.” “Or you think you must,” said the duke, viewing with small pleasure a suit of Damascene armor which an ancestor had worn before Acre and Antioch, wreathed and smothered with long trails made of the united blossoms of cattleya and tigredia, whilst within its open vizor two golden orioles sat upon a nest. “Do you think that in good taste?” he said, pointing to it. “No; execrable. Nothing done in time is ever otherwise,” said Mouse with unusual sincerity. “We are never merry, and we are never sorry; so we heap up flowers to make believe for us at our dances and our burials. You are quite right, Pater, in the abstract. But, you see, we can’t live in the abstract. We must do as others do.”