“You are quite didactic, my dear Lionel,” said Lord Mowbray, who since the storm looked on his host with suspicion, and on all social guides in general, and Danford in particular, with contempt. He had absolutely declined to avail himself of the services of Music Hall artists, relying on his own powers of observation to guide him through life. He had even gone so far as to seek an engagement as a guide himself; but Society, however it may pat on the back every amateur or exponent of mediocrity, has the wisdom, in emergencies, to draw the line and to appeal to the professionals who, they well know, do not fail in technique. Lord Mowbray was therefore unemployed and generally uninformed. Left to his own conceit and ignorance, he constantly made the most terrible mistakes in drawing-rooms, and ignored the public guides stationed at different corners of crowded thoroughfares, who had taken the place of old-fashioned constables; to these guides Mowbray would never apply, passing them with haughty disdain. Each day he committed every conceivable _faux pas_; bowing to his friends’ butlers, passing by ignominiously his smart friends; in fact; he was the laughing-stock of Society, although he was blatantly happy and thoroughly unconscious of his folly. “What I really came for this afternoon, my lord,” suddenly broke in Danford, “was to tell you of a very serious reform in our new mode of life—or, at least, death. There are to be no more funerals!” “What do you mean?” “You are joking!” “No more burials?” “Are we to be thrown away like dogs and cats?” “How are you going to hand us over to the other side?” All these indignant questions fell like a volley on Danford the imperturbable, who looked at his pupil. “We again need your support, my lord. This is the point: without plumes, palls, muffled drums, mutes, how are we to know a Peer’s obsequies from a pauper’s? The chairman of our Committee put it to me in these words yesterday: ‘My dear Dan, try and make Society leaders see that complete privacy in that last and not least important function is of most vital import, if they wish to keep up a certain prestige.’ I promised to mention this to you, and I must add that I am struck myself with the unfitness of a lord of the realm having no better funeral than a vagabond; it seems to me irrelevant.” “There is the rub of this new state of ours; it has awakened in us the sense of the incongruous,” remarked George Murray. “We used not to be so discriminate, and what struck me most, formerly, was the total lack of humour in people who passed for witty.”