rable
charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence,
having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had
to say before he was thirty. His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur, one
of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so
dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book.
Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most
intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a Ministerial statement
in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely
earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once
himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of
them ever quite escape.

"We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry," cried the Duchess,
nodding pleasantly to him across the table. "Do you think he will really
marry this fascinating young person?"

"I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess."

"How dreadful!" exclaimed Lady Agatha. "Really, someone should
interfere."

"I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American
dry-goods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.

"My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas."

"Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the Duchess, raising her
large hands in wonder, and accentuating the verb.

"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.

The Duchess looked puzzled.

"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means
anything that he says."

"When America was discovered," said the Radical member, and he began to
give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject,
he exhausted his listeners. The Duchess sighed, and exercised her
privilege of interruption. "I wish to goodness it never had been
discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance
nowadays. It is most unfair."

"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr.
Erskine. "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."

"Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the
Duchess, vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely
pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I
wish I could afford to do the same."

"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir
Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off cloth