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He spoke with pointed levity, but his companion showed him after an instant a face just covered—and a little painfully—with the vision of the possibility brushed away by the joke. "Oh I'm not so bad as that!" Mr. Longdon modestly ejaculated.

"Well, she doesn't do it always," Vanderbank laughed, "and it's nothing moreover to what some people are called. Why, there was a fellow there— " He pulled up, however, and, thinking better of it, selected another instance. "The Duchess—weren't you introduced to the Duchess?—never calls me anything but 'Vanderbank' unless she calls me 'caro mio.' It wouldn't have taken much to make her appeal to YOU with an 'I say, Longdon!' I can quite hear her."

Mr. Longdon, focussing the effect of the sketch, pointed its moral with an indulgent: "Oh well, a FOREIGN duchess!" He could make his distinctions.

"Yes, she's invidiously, cruelly foreign," Vanderbank agreed: "I've never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it. She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood—she's a Neapolitan hatched by an incubator."