nce of the aristocratic
theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated
intentions.

"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady
Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a
lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what
we're all after, isn't ut?

"It's not an ideal arrangement."

"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.

On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
education, Lady Forthundred scored.

We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my
old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of
the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of
energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of
daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the
new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.

"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any nonsense
about nobility."

She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a
practical people. We assimilate 'um."

"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"

"Then they don't give trouble."

"They learn to shoot?"

"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on. Sometimes
better than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends very much on the
sort of butler who pokes 'um about."

I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a
year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.

"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,
courageously....

Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the
brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth
cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely,
against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every
spacious social scene? How did things look to them?

7

Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with
his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal
mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. He led
all these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested about
life, wary beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented my brain to get
to the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man in
England under the throne; he had the Lords in his ha