Pinking beats chopping. These English 'll have their lesson. It 's like
what you call good writing: the simple way does the business, and that's
the most difficult to learn, because you must give your head to it, as
those French fellows do. 'Trop de finesse' is rather their fault.
Anything's better than loutishness. Well! the lesson 'll come.'

He continued. He spoke as he thought: he was not speaking what he was
thinking. His mind was directed on the visit of Aminta to Lady de Culme,
and the tolerably wonderful twist whereby Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had
vowed herself to his girl's interests. And he blamed neither of them;
only he could not understand how it had been effected, for Aminta and
Mrs. Lawrence had not been on such particularly intimate terms last week
or yesterday. His ejaculation, 'Women!' was, as he knew, merely
ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm. But it allied him with all
previous generations on the male side, and that was its virtue. His view
of the shifty turns of women got no further, for the reason that he took
small account of the operations of the feelings, to the sole exercise of
which he by system condemned the sex.

He was also insensibly half a grain more soured by the homage of those
poor schoolboys, who called to him to take it for his reward in a country
whose authorities had snubbed, whose Parliament had ignored, whose Press
had abused him. The ridiculous balance made him wilfully oblivious that
he had seen his name of late eulogized in articles and in books for the
right martial qualities. Can a country treating a good soldier--not
serving it for pay--in so scurvy a fashion, be struck too hard with our
disdain? One cannot tell it in too plain a language how one despises its
laws, its moralities, its sham of society. The Club, some choice
anecdotists, two or three listeners to his dolences clothed as diatribes;
a rubber, and the sight of his girl at home, composed, with a week's