the crime of property, and
Bradlaugh will grub up their leafy haunts with a steam plough from
Chicago."

CHAPTER IV.

Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is
full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are
cooing at Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their existences
are diverting themselves in other scenes, Highland moors, German baths,
French chateaux, Channel yachting, or at other English country houses.
It is George Usk's opinion that the whole thing is immoral: he is by no
means a moral person himself. His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it
is the only way to have your house liked, and that nobody is supposed to
know anything, and that nothing of that sort matters; she is a woman who
on her own account has never done anything that she would in the least
mind having printed in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow.

"Strange contradiction!" muses Brandolin. "Here is George, who's
certainly no better than he should be, hallooing out for Dame Propriety,
and here's my lady, who's always run as straight as a crow flies, making
an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To the pure all things
are pure, I suppose; but if purity can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and
Lady Dawlish, I think I shall select my wife from among _les jolies
impures_."

However, he takes care audibly to hold up his hostess's opinions and
condemn her lord's.

"The poor little woman means well, and only likes to be popular," he
reflects; "and we are none of us so sure that we shan't want indulgence
some day."

Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, as becomes a man
of the world; he is even considered by many of his friends a good deal
too lax in all his views; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague
dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He may have been
glad enough to avail himself of the defect; that is another matter; he
does not like it, does not admire it: licentiousness in a woman seems to
him a fault in her taste; it is as if she wore fur slippers with her
court train. "Of course," he will say, apologetically, "this idea of
mine is born of the absurd English conventionality which sleeps in all
of us; nothing better; an Englishman is always conventional somewhere,
let him live as he will."

He himself is the most unconventional of beings, appalls his county,
terrifies his relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop of his
dioc