o need of names, your highness." Georges Desmarets was
diminutive, black-haired and corpulent. He was of dapper appearance,
point-device in everything, and he reminded you of a perky robin.

The tutor flung out an "Ouf! I must recall to you that, thank heaven, I
am not anybody's highness any longer. I am Paul Vanderhoffen."

"He says that he is not Prince Fribble!"--the little man addressed the
zenith--"as if any other person ever succeeded in talking a half-hour
without being betrayed into at least one sensible remark. Oh, how do
you manage without fail to be so consistently and stupendously idiotic?"

"It is, like all other desirable traits, either innate or else just
unattainable," the other answered. "I am so hopelessly light-minded
that I cannot refrain from being rational even in matters which concern
me personally--and this, of course, no normal being ever thinks of
doing. I really cannot help it."

The Frenchman groaned whole-heartedly.

"But we were speaking--well, of foreign countries. Now, Paul
Vanderhoffen has read that in one of these countries there was once a
prince who very narrowly escaped figuring as a self-conscious
absurdity, as an anachronism, as a life-long prisoner of etiquette.
However, with the assistance of his cousin--who, incidentally, was also
his heir--the prince most opportunely died. Oh, pedant that you are!
in any event he was interred. And so, the prince was gathered to his
fathers, and his cousin Augustus reigned in his stead. Until a certain
politician who had been privy to this pious fraud----" The tutor
shrugged. "How can I word it without seeming hypercritical?"

Georges Desmarets stretched out appealing hands. "But, I protest, it
was the narrow-mindedness of that pernicious prig, your cousin--who
firmly believes himself to be an improved and augmented edition of the
Four Evangelists----"

"Well, in any event, the proverb was attested that birds of a feather
make strange bedfellows. There was a dispute concerning some petit
larceny--some slight discrepancy, we will imagine, since all this is
pure romance, in the politician's accounts----"

"Now you belie me----" said the black-haired man, and warmly.

"Oh, Desmarets, you are as vain as ever! Let us say, then, of grand
larceny. In any event, the politician was dismissed. And what, my
dears, do you suppose this bold and bad and unprincipled Machiavelli
went and did? Why, he made straight for the father of th