"A most unpleasant idea!" her brother objected. "Confess, now, if you could see two rows of ancestors, all illuminated, looking at you while you ate, wouldn't it make you feel greedy?" The conversation drifted away and became general. The Duchess leaned towards her neighbour. "I think I am rather sorry I came here," she whispered. "Why?" he asked. "Because I find you disappointing. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering you upon the steamer. You were delightfully primitive, an absolute cave-dweller, but you quite repaid my efforts to make a human being of you. You were really almost as interesting when we first met in London. And now, I don't know what it is, but you seem to have gone thousands of miles away again. You don't seem properly human. Don't you like women, or have you got some queer scheme in your head which keeps you living like a man with his head in the clouds? Or are you in love?" "I haven't settled down to idleness yet, perhaps," he suggested. "Of course," she went on, "you ought to be in love with me, and miserable about it, but I am horribly afraid you aren't. I believe you have matrimonial schemes in your mind. I believe that your affections are so well-trained that they mean to trot all along the broad way to St. George's, Hanover Square." "And would you advise something different?" he asked bluntly. "My dear man, why am I here?" she expostulated. "I have a fancy for having you devoted to me. What I mean to do with it when I have captured your heart, I am not quite sure." Every one was listening to a story which old General Turnbull was telling. Even Sylvia had leaned across the table. David turned and looked steadily into his companion's face. "It seems to me," he said, "that only a very short time ago, Duchess, out of solicitude for my extreme ignorance, you warned me against setting my affections too high." "I was speaking then of marriage," she replied coolly. "I see! And yet," he went on, "I am not quite sure that I do see. Is there any radical difference between marriage and a really intimate friendship between a man and a woman?" She smiled. Her slight movement towards him was almost a caress. "My dear, unsophisticated cave-dweller!" she murmured. "Marriage is an alliance which lasts for all time. It is apt, is it not, to leave its stamp upon future generations. Great friendships have existed amongst people curiously diverse in tastes and temperament and position. A certain disparity, in fact, is rather the vogue." "I begin to understand," he admitted. "That accounts for the curious club stories which one is always having dinned into one's ears, hatefully uninteresting though they are, of Lady So-and-So entertaining a great fiddler at her country house, or some other Society lady dancing in a singular lack of costume for the pleasure of artists in a borrowed studio." "You are not nearly so nice-minded as I thought you were," the Duchess snapped.