Waverley whom he does like, and Lady
Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped,
annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has bought
Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie, having gone irrevocably out of his hands,
represents to him for the time being the one absolutely to be desired
spot upon earth. Good heavens! he thinks, can he have been such a fool
as to sell it?

When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much promise going up to Oxford
from Eton, he had a clever brain, a love of classics, and much
inclination to scholarly pursuits; but he gradually lost all these
tastes little by little, he could not very well have said how; and now
he never hardly opens a book, and he has drifted into that odd, English
habit of only counting time by the seasons for killing things. There is
nothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he scorns, so he falls
foul of his wife's list of people she has invited, which is lying,
temptingly provocative, of course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled in
pencil on a sheet of note-paper.

"Always the same thing!" he says, as he glances over it. "Always the
very worst lot you could get together, and there isn't one of the
husbands or one of the wives!"

"Of course there isn't," says Lady Usk, looking up from a Society
newspaper which told her that her friends were all where they were not,
and fitted all the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yet
from some mysterious reason gave her amusement on account of its very
blunders.

"I do think," he continues, "that nobody on earth ever had such
absolutely indecent house-parties as yours!"

"You always say these absurd things."

"I don't think they're absurd. Look at your list: everybody asks that he
may meet somebody whom he shouldn't meet!"

"What nonsense! As if they didn't all meet everywhere every day, and as
if it mattered!"

"It does matter."

He has not been a moral man himself, but at fifty he likes to _faire la
morale pour les autres_. When we are compelled to relinquish cakes and
ale ourselves, we begin honestly to believe them indigestible for
everybody; why should they be sold, or be made, at all?

"It does matter," he repeats. "Your people are too larky, much too
larky. You grow worse every year. You don't care a straw what's said
about 'em so long as they please you, and you let 'em carry on till
there's the devil to pay."

"They pay him,--I don't; and they like it."

"I know they like it,