balance matters. And I think there should be a sort of
bounty-fed export (is that the right expression?) of the
people who impress on you that you ought to take life
seriously. There are only two classes that really can't help
taking life seriously--schoolgirls of thirteen and
Hohenzollerns; they might be exempt. Albanians come under
another heading; they take life whenever they get the
opportunity. The one Albanian that I was ever on speaking
terms with was rather a decadent example. He was a Christian
and a grocer, and I don't fancy he had ever killed anybody.
I didn't like to question him on the subject--that showed my
delicacy. Mrs. Nicorax says I have no delicacy; she hasn't
forgiven me about the mice. You see, when I was staying down
there, a mouse used to cake-walk about my room half the
night, and none of their silly patent traps seemed to take
its fancy as a bijou residence, so I determined to appeal to
the better side of it--which with mice is the inside. So I
called it Percy, and put little delicacies down near its hole
every night, and that kept it quiet while I read Max Nordau's
Degeneration and other reproving literature, and went to
sleep. And now she says there is a whole colony of mice in
that room.

That isn't where the indelicacy comes in. She went out
riding with me, which was entirely her own suggestion, and as
we were coming home through some meadows she made a quite
unnecessary attempt to see if her pony would jump a rather
messy sort of brook that was there. It wouldn't. It went
with her as far as the water's edge, and from that point Mrs.
Nicorax went on alone. Of course I had to fish her out from