iss.

"Square be d----!" There was a great deal in the lesson there
enunciated which demanded consideration. Hitherto the Major had
fought his battles with a certain adherence to squareness. If his
angles had not all been perfect angles, still there had always been
an attempt at geometrical accuracy. He might now and again have
told a lie about a horse--but who that deals in horses has not done
that? He had been alive to the value of underhand information from
racing-stables, but who won't use a tip if he can get it? He had lied
about the expense of his hounds, in order to enhance the subscription
of his members. Those were things which everybody did in his line.
But Green had meant something beyond this.

As far as he could see out in the world at large, nobody was square.
You had to keep your mouth shut, or your teeth would be stolen out of
it. He didn't look into a paper without seeing that on all sides of
him men had abandoned the idea of squareness. Chairmen, directors,
members of Parliament, ambassadors,--all the world, as he told
himself,--were trying to get on by their wits. He didn't see why he
should be more square than anybody else. Why hadn't Silverbridge
taken him down to Scotland for the grouse?

CHAPTER XXXVII

Grex

Far away from all known places, in the northern limit of the Craven
district, on the borders of Westmorland but in Yorkshire, there
stands a large, rambling, most picturesque old house called Grex. The
people around call it the Castle, but it is not a castle. It is an
old brick building supposed to have been erected in the days of James
the First, having oriel windows, twisted chimneys, long galleries,
gable ends, a quadrangle of which the house surrounds three sides,
terraces, sun-dials, and fish-ponds. But it is so sadly out of repair
as to be altogether unfit for the residence of a gentleman and his
family. It stands not in a park, for the land about it is divided
into paddocks by low stone walls, but in the midst of lovely scenery,
the ground rising all round it in low irregular hills or fells, and
close to it, a quarter of a mile from the back of the house, there is
a small dark lake, not serenely lovely as are some of the lakes in
Westmorland, but attractive by the darkness of its waters and the
gloom of the woods around it.

This is the country seat of Earl Grex,--which however he had not
visited for some years. Gradually the place had got into such a
condition that hi