However, a disappointment was in store for Lady Pridmore. This rather strange looking young man with the shy and embarrassed manner was not so communicative on the subject in conversation with her as he had been when Mary had met him at dinner. He had really very little to tell her. For one thing, it was by no means so easy to converse with her as it had been with the altogether delightful daughter who knew exactly when and how to lend a hand. The mother of Klondyke had therefore to do most of the talking about that unsatisfactory young man. She certainly did it very well. That is to say, she talked about him in a very even, precise, persistent, Hyde-Park-lady tone. And the Sailor, as he sat listening with awe to a conversation in which he did not feel in the least able to bear a part, could only marvel that Klondyke had had such a mother as Lady Pridmore and that Lady Pridmore had had such a son as Klondyke. It had always been Lady Pridmore's wish that her eldest son should enter his father's profession. In the first place, he would have had Influence to help him, and if there was anything more precious in the sight of Lady Pridmore than Influence, it would have been very hard to discover it. Again, he was the offspring of two diplomatic families; at least, it was recorded in Burke, where each family's record was set out at considerable length and no doubt with reasonable veracity, that diplomacy was one of the callings which adorned two supremely honorable escutcheons. In the opinion of Mary, also in that of Silvia, who ought to have been back from Mudie's by now, and also, but in a less degree, in the opinion of Otto--named after his godfather, a certain Prince Otto von Bismarck--who generally got home from the Foreign Office about five, their mother exaggerated the importance of the Pridmores of Yorkshire and the Colthursts of Suffolk. No doubt they were two fairly old and respectable families; Burke could certainly show cause for setting store by them; each family ran to two full pages, fairly bristling with peers and baronets and Lady Charlottes and Lady Sophias; and yet, to their mother's grief, these three heretics, Mary, Silvia, and Otto, generally known as the Prince, took pleasure in developing the theory that it was mere Victorianism for Burke or anyone else to flaunt such a pride in the Colthursts and the Pridmores. "Because," said Mary, "it is not as though either family has ever produced anybody at all first-rate in anything."