grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of
course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in
educating Captain Ashburnham--oh, of course, quite pour le bon
motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how
you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora
herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At
any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her.
Perhaps she got it up out of Baedeker before Florence was up in
the morning. I don't mean to say that you would ever have known
that Leonora knew anything, but if Florence started to tell us how
Ludwig the Courageous wanted to have three wives at once--in
which he differed from Henry VIII, who wanted them one after
the other, and this caused a good deal of trouble--if Florence
started to tell us this, Leonora would just nod her head in a way
that quite pleasantly rattled my poor wife.

She used to exclaim: "Well, if you knew it, why haven't you told it
all already to Captain Ashburnham? I'm sure he finds it
interesting!" And Leonora would look reflectively at her husband
and say: "I have an idea that it might injure his hand--the hand,
you know, used in connection with horses' mouths. . . ." And poor
Ashburnham would blush and mutter and would say: "That's all
right. Don't you bother about me."

I fancy his wife's irony did quite alarm poor Teddy; because one
evening he asked me seriously in the smoking-room if I thought
that having too much in one's head would really interfere with
one's quickness in polo. It struck him, he said, that brainy
Johnnies generally were rather muffs when they got on to four
legs. I reassured him as best I could. I told him that he wasn't