"What did you do that for?" he demanded.

"Just to waken you up," she answered.

"Are they always like this?" the prince asked, much edified.

"This is nothing," groaned Mr. Hamilton-Wells.

"Nothing if it is not genius," the prince suggested gracefully.

"The ineffectual genius of the nineteenth century I fancy, which betrays
itself by strange incongruities and contrasts of a violent kind, but is
otherwise unproductive," Mrs. Orton Beg whispered to Mr. Frayling
incautiously.

Lady Adeline looked up: "I could not help hearing," she said.

"Oh, Adeline, I am sorry!" Mrs. Orton Beg exclaimed.

"_I_ thank you," said Lady Adeline, sighing. "Courtly phrases are
pleasant plums, even to latter-day palates which are losing all taste for
such dainties; but they are not nourishing. I would rather know my
children to be merely naughty, and spend my time in trying to make them
good, than falsely flatter myself that there is anything great in them,
and indulge them on that plea, until I had thoroughly confirmed them in
faults which I ought to have been rigorously repressing."

"You're right there," said Mr. Frayling; "but all the same, you'll be able
to make a good deal of that boy, or I'm much mistaken. And as for