our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape, if he will. As
guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord-lieutenant, member--for the sake
of his name and his acres--of various important commissions, as military
_attaché_ even, for a short space, to an important embassy, he had
acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had
often envied him--a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct, as to both
men and affairs, which were often of more service to him than finer
brains to other persons. But, like most accomplishments, these also
brought their own conceit with them. Lord Grosville having, in his own
opinion, done extremely well without much book education himself, had
but little appreciation for it in others.

Nevertheless he rarely missed a chance of conversation with William
Ashe, not because the younger man, in spite of his past indolence, was
generally held to be both able and accomplished, but because the elder
found in him an invincible taste for men and women, their fortunes,
oddities, catastrophes--especially the latter--similar to his own.

Like Mary Lyster, both were good gossips; but of a much more
disinterested type than she. Women indeed as gossips are too apt to
pursue either the damnation of some one else or the apotheosis of
themselves. But here the stupider no less than the abler man showed a
certain broad detachment not very common in women--amused by the human
comedy itself, making no profit out of it, either for themselves or
morals, but asking only that the play should go on.

The incident, or rather the heroine of the evening, had given Lord
Grosville a topic which in the case of William Ashe he saw no reason for
avoiding; and in the peace of the smoking-room, when he was no longer
either hungry for his dinner or worried by his responsibilities as host,