to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief
over last time?--because they can't remember whether
it's Ispahan or Teheran that's the capital of Persia.

"They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both
places at the point of the bayonet--and find out their
names afterward--but it seems that's not what the Army
wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior clerks,
and secretaries and professors of languages--and much
good they will do us when the time of trouble comes!"

"Then you think the purchase-system was better?"
asked the American lady. "It always seemed to me
that that must have worked so curiously."

"Prefer it?" said Lady Plowden. "A thousand times
yes! My husband made one of the best speeches in the
debate on it--one do I say?--first and last he must
have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched
Radical outcry, it would have been those speeches.
He pointed out all the evils that would follow the change.
You might have called it prophetic--the way he foresaw
what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular,
of course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.

"As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind
of people the lower classes naturally look up to and
obey and follow. Will they be ordered about by a man