who
was in the diplomatic service, and who had prospects afterwards of
coming into money and a peerage, was now absent on a distant mission.
They had not been married very long, but his wife was always ready to
take things cheerfully, and, since she could not accompany him, she had
made up her mind to be happy without him; and the trip with her brother
was "just the very thing." Mr. Barker admired what he called her
exuberant vitality, and expressed his opinion that people with a
digestion like that were always having a good time. She was strong and
healthy, and destined to be the mother of many bold sons, and she had a
certain beauty born of a good complexion, bright eyes, and white teeth.
To look at her, you would have said she must be the daughter of some
robust and hardworking settler, accustomed from her youth to face rain
and snow and sunshine in ready reliance on her inborn strength. She did
not suggest dukes and duchesses in the least. Alas! the generation of
those ruddy English boys and girls is growing rarer day by day, and a
mealy-faced, over-cerebrated people are springing up, who with their
children again, in trying to rival the brain-work of foreigners with
larger skulls and more in them, forget that their English forefathers
have always done everything by sheer strength and bloodshed, and can as
easily hope to accomplish anything by skill as a whale can expect to
dance upon the tight rope. They would do better, thought Lady Victoria,
to give it up, to abandon the struggle for intellectual superiority of
that kind. They have produced greater minds when, the mass of their
countrymen were steeped in brutality, and Elizabethan surfeit of beef
and ale, than they will ever produce with a twopenny-halfpenny universal
education. What is the use? Progress. What is progress? Merely the
adequate arrangement of inequalities--in the words of one of their own
thinkers who knows most about it and troubles himself least about
theories. What is the use of your "universal" education, to which
nine-tenths of the population submit as to a hopeless evil, which takes
bread out of their mouths and puts bran into their heads; for might they
not be at work in the fields instead of scratching pothooks on a slate?
At least so Lady Victoria thought.

"You look just like a sailor," said she to Claudius.

"I feel like one," he answered, "and I think I shall adopt the sea as a
profession."

"It is such a pity," said Miss Skeat, ster