During the drive up to town, while Clarehaven was sitting back playing with his wife's wrist and looking fatuously content, he turned to her once and said: "Dorothy, you _were_ rather brutal with poor old Olive." She withdrew her hand from his grasp, and not until he ceased condoling with Olive did she let him pick it up again. "And oh dear, oh lord, oh my!" he exclaimed, "we must have the jolly old collie down at Clare." "The collie?" she repeated. "What collie?" "Your collie." He began to whistle the bewitching tune. "Please don't. One hears it everywhere," she said, fretfully. "Olive will look after the dog. She's just lost her Pekinese." CHAPTER IV I About the time that the fifth Earl of Clarehaven upset the lares and penates of his house by marrying a Vanity girl the people of Great Britain, having baited with red rags the golden calf of Victorianism until the poor beast had leaped from its pedestal and disappeared in the flowing tide, were now accepting from a lamasery of Liberal reformers the idol of silver speech, forgetting either that silver tarnishes more quickly than gold or that new brooms sweep clean, but soon wear out. However, the new era lasted for quite a month, and long enough for the Dowager Countess of Clarehaven to reach the conclusion that her son's marriage was a sign of the times. Poets extract consolation for their private woes and joys from observing that nature sympathizes with them. When they are fain to weep, the skies weep with them; April's weather follows the caprice of the girl next door; even great Ocean laughs when his little friend the rhymester gets two guineas for a sonnet. What is permitted to a poet will not be denied to a countess, and if the dowager considered her chagrin to be a feather in the mighty wing of revolution--to the widows of Conservative peers down in Devonshire the return of the Liberal party in 1906 seemed nothing less than revolution--she should not, therefore, be accused of exaggeration.