"Oh, but you must," he said, "or they can have you up. Potter is dying to get at you. I gave him a piece of my mind this morning, but I can't say that it made much impression on him. I know Potter of old; we were at the university together. He is arrogance personified. He pretended not to know me this morning, and asked me a lot of questions about my master and mistress--as to how they spent their money, and whether there was any difficulty about keeping up the household bills to the proper figure. I told him plainly that if he had taken on the job of an inspector he had no right to come without his uniform, and if he hadn't the accounts of this house were no affair of his. The impudence of his pretending that he thought the Perrys were ordinary rich people whose house he could go in and out of just as it pleased him! I would not even take his name into them, and he went away without having got much change out of _me_. You stand up to him when he comes this afternoon. Satisfy the police that you had nothing to do with the burglary, and don't let him see that you are annoyed with him for putting them on to you. You will score off him best if you ignore him altogether. Well, I will tell Mrs. Perry that you are here. Mr. Howard, is it not? I don't think you gave me a card." When the necessary formalities had been gone through, and I had taken my place at the luncheon-table, I asked what right Lord Potter had to accompany the police in their duties, and to make himself obnoxious to anyone whom he happened to dislike. "None," said Mr. Perry emphatically. But Mrs. Perry said: "Well, he is a member of the House of Lords. As such, he might consider it his duty to look into anything that he thought was going wrong." "As a member of the House of Lords," said Mr. Perry didactically, "he has a share in making laws which we all have to obey. It is not part of his duty to administer them." "I beg your pardon," said Lord Arthur. "I don't like Potter, but I must stand up for him there. It _is_ his duty as a member of the ruling class to interest himself in public behaviour. The House of Lords has been shorn of much of its powers, but the influence of its members remains." "As the son of a peer, my dear Arthur," said Mr. Perry, "you are quite right to stand up for your order, and if every peer were like your father there would be no objection to their claiming such rights as Lord Potter, for instance, claims--to have free entry into every house, in order that he may satisfy himself that its occupants are behaving themselves as they should do. But we are a democratic country, and, as things stand now, such a claim as that must be resisted, however reasonable it may have been a hundred years ago."