many warm
attachments to women who help to make her house attractive.

"Nationalities are still discernible in different tobaccos," murmurs
Brandolin. "The Havana won't acknowledge an equal in the Cavour."

"Dolly don't know anything about her," continues Usk, clinging to the
subject.

"Oh, my dear!" cried his wife, shocked, "when she is the niece of the
great Chancellor and her mother was a Princess Dourtza."

"You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, with that unpleasant
obstinacy characteristic of men when they talk to their wives. "You met
her in Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she may have sent
a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve to go there herself, for
anything you can tell. One can never be sure of anything about
foreigners."

"How absurd you are, and how _insular_!" cries Dorothy Usk, again.
"'Foreigners!' As if there were any foreigners in these days, when
Europe is like one family!"

"A family which, like most families, squabbles and scratches pretty
often, then," says Usk,--which seems to his wife a reply too vulgar to
be worthy of contradiction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a
very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by descent and
alliance, are wholly irreproachable,--indeed, written in that _libro
d'oro_, the "Almanach de Gotha," for all who choose to read.

Her descent and her diamonds are alike immaculate, but her
character?--he is too old-fashioned a Briton not to think it very
probable that there is something _louche_ there.

Usk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true Tory. He has a rooted
impression that all Russians are spies when they are not swindlers; much
as in the early years of the century his grandsire had been positive
that all Frenchmen were assassins when they were not dancing-masters.
The White Czar has replaced the Petit Caporal, and the fur cap the
cocked hat, in the eyes of Englishmen of Usk's type, as an object of
dread and detestation. He would never be in the least surprised if it
turned out that the real object of Madame Sabaroff's visit to Surrenden
were to have possible opportunities to examine the facilities of
Weymouth as a landing-place for Cossacks out of Muscovite corvettes.

"Russians are tremendous swells at palaver," he says, with much
contempt, "gammon you no end if you like to believe 'em: they've always
some political dodge or other behind it all."

"I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman," he continues, now: