d looking up with the old faded eyes, that were becoming
ringed with white.

Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess with Mr.
Pepper. He was being defeated, naturally, for Mr. Pepper scarcely took
his eyes off the board, and Mr. Elliot kept leaning back in his chair
and throwing out remarks to a gentleman who had only arrived the night
before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head of an
intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general nature had passed,
they were discovering that they knew some of the same people, as indeed
had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.

"Ah yes, old Truefit," said Mr. Elliot. "He has a son at Oxford. I've
often stayed with them. It's a lovely old Jacobean house. Some exquisite
Greuzes--one or two Dutch pictures which the old boy kept in the
cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks of prints. Oh, the dirt in
that house! He was a miser, you know. The boy married a daughter of
Lord Pinwells. I know them too. The collecting mania tends to run in
families. This chap collects buckles--men's shoe-buckles they must be,
in use between the years 1580 and 1660; the dates mayn't be right, but
fact's as I say. Your true collector always has some unaccountable
fad of that kind. On other points he's as level-headed as a breeder of
shorthorns, which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you
probably know, have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for
instance--" he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering his
move,--"Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people with
big front teeth. I've heard her shout across a table, 'Keep your mouth
shut, Miss Smith; they're as yellow as carrots!' across a table, mind
you. To me she's always been civility itself. She dabbles in literature,
likes to collect a few of us in her drawing-room, but mention a
clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself, and she gobbles
like a turkey-cock. I've been told it's a family feud--something to do
with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the First. Yes," he continued,
suffering check after check, "I always like to know something of the
grandmothers of our fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve
all that we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage, in the
majority of cases, that they are personally clean. Not that one would
insult old Lady Barborough by calling her clean. How often d'you think,
H