Katherine Massarene sighed. “My father will never lose except when he chooses to do so. If they use him, he uses them. It is a _quid pro quo_. It is a question of barter. But that is what is so disgraceful about it.” “I have said,” replied her host, “I think if I were an intelligent man who had made a pot of money by my own exertions, as Mr. Massarene has done, that I should not care a damn (excuse the word) for all the fine folks in creation. Certainly I should not care to waste my money upon them. But the fact is that all these new men do care for that and that alone. They appear wholly to underrate themselves and their own accomplishment, and care only to be rooked by a set of idle loungers with handles to their names. It is not they who will ever destroy the Upper House.” “No,” said his guest bitterly. “An earl can see and say that the days of the Upper House are numbered, but my father regards it as the holy of holies because he means to seat himself in its gilded chamber.” “It’s Joe Chamberlain’s reason too,” said Framlingham with a chuckle. “When we make peers of the tradesmen, my dear, we know what we are about; we are soldering our own leaking pot.” “Solder it with other men’s smelted gold? You had better break it up honestly as a thing which has had its day and is done with.” “Poor old pot! Perhaps it would be better to bury it for good and all on Runnymede island. But I think you exaggerate a little--I must say you exaggerate. And you totally ignore a fact which has been put on record by every English sociologist and historian, that it has been its frank admission to its ranks of _novi homines_ which has kept the English aristocracy vigorous and popular.” She gave a scornful gesture of denial. “It is the _novi homines_ who have degraded the English aristocracy. Pardon me if I contradict you. Mr. Mallock has written very kind and possibly very just things of your nobility, but he has forgotten to satirize its most shameful infirmity, its moral scrofula--its incessant and unblushing prostration of itself before wealth _quà_ wealth. It likes hothouse pines and can no longer afford to keep them for its own eating. It can only grow them for sale and eat them at the tables of those who buy them.” “That is very severe!” “Who would be less severe who had seen anything at all of Paris, of London, of Nice, of Biarritz, of any place where modern society disports itself?” Framlingham laughed. “My dear Miss Massarene, you delight me beyond expression, but I can imagine that you are, to a parent who adores princes and means to die a peer, rather--rather--forgive a vulgar word--rather a handful.”