"What do you think of my heiress?" he said, at last, as we paused beneath a Tintoretto. I said everything suitable and encouraging I could think of. "I am quite pleased with her," he allowed, "but I fear she will not be content with the rôle I had planned out for my Duchess. She is too individual. I feel it is I who would subside and attend to the nurseries and the spring cleaning. However, I mean to go through with it, although I am in a hideous position, because, you know, I am falling very deeply in love with you." "How inconvenient for you!"' I said, smiling. "But please do not let that interfere with your prospects. You must attend to the subject of pleasing the heiress, as I see great signs of Lord Luffton cutting the ground from under your feet." He stared at me incredulously. "Luffy!" he said, aghast. "Oh, but Cordelia would take care of that. He is her friend." "Oh, how you amuse me, all of you," I said, laughing, "with your loves and your jealousies and your little arrangements! Every one two and two; every one with a 'friend.'" "Anyway, we are not wearyingly faithful." "No; but to a stranger you ought to issue a kind of guide-book--'Trespassers will be prosecuted' here, 'A change would be welcomed' there, etc." "'Pon my word new editions would have to come out every three months, then. In the space of a year you would find a general shuffle had taken place." "Shall you let your Duchess have a 'friend'?" I asked. He mused a little. "Could I have found my cow brewer's daughter, she would have been too virtuously middle class to have thought of such a thing. And if I take this American--well, the Americans are so new a nation they have still a moral sense. So I think I am pretty safe." "Old nations are deficient in this quality, then?" "Yes. Artificial things are more worn out, and they get back nearer to nature." "But you would object to a 'friend'?" "Considerably, until the succession was firmly secured. After that, I suppose, my Duchess might please herself. She probably would, too, without consulting me. You don't see the whole of your neighbors eating cake and remain content with your own monotonous bread-and-butter." This appeared to be very true. He continued in a meditative way: "Because a few what we call civilized nations have set up a standard of morality for themselves, that does not change the ways of human nature. What we call morality has no existence in the natural world." "Why should the respectable middle-class brewer's daughter have so strong a sense of it, then?" I asked. "Because propriety is their god from one generation to another. You can almost overcome nature with a god sometimes. Babykins has a theory that the food we eat makes a difference in the ways of our class, but I don't believe that. It is because we hunt and shoot and live lives of inclination, not compulsion, like the middle classes, and so we get back nearer to nature."