"You amaze me, dear friend, and yet both your aspirations are noble
and eminently proper," said the Duchess; "Coriander is but a
child,--and yet," she added, looking graciously upon her companion,
"for the matter of that, so are you."


CHAPTER III.


Mr. Putney Giles's was Lothaw's first grand dinner-party. Yet, by
carefully watching the others, he managed to acquit himself
creditably, and avoided drinking out of the finger-bowl by first
secretly testing its contents with a spoon. The conversation was
peculiar and singularly interesting.

"Then you think that monogamy is simply a question of the
thermometer?" said Mrs. Putney Giles to her companion.

"I certainly think that polygamy should be limited by isothermal
lines," replied Lothaw.

"I should say it was a matter of latitude," observed a loud
talkative man opposite. He was an Oxford Professor with a taste
for satire, and had made himself very obnoxious to the company,
during dinner, by speaking disparagingly of a former well-known
Chancellor of the Exchequer,--a great statesman and brilliant
novelist,--whom he feared and hated.

Suddenly there was a sensation in the room; among the females it
absolutely amounted to a nervous thrill. His Eminence, the