Part 18 (1/2)
”Yes, very--have not you?”
”No, because I have had no illusions--one never can tell where a side cross comes in, or what will be the effect of overbreeding--that runs to enormities sometimes.”
”I suppose so--”
”And have the moral qualities surprised you also?”
”Oh, yes--more than the physical; I have seen and heard what I would have thought were common things even at Bindon's Green.”
He laughed again--If the crew who had attended the tableaux rehearsals could have heard her!
”You are perfectly right--looked at in the abstract, I suppose we are rather a shoddy company nowadays.”
”There are individuals who come up to the measure, of course, but not all of them, as I had imagined. You must have opened the doors to quite ordinary people to have made such a mixture.”
”We have grown indifferent; we no longer care about a standard, I fear.”
”That is why you let all these Radicals be in power, perhaps--You have become effete like the n.o.bles before the revolution in France, who could only die like gentlemen, but not live like men.”
Gerard Strobridge was startled. This from the granddaughter of a butcher of Bindon's Green!
”She picks it all up from Seraphim, of course,” he reflected presently.
”And yet--look at her strange face!--it is a woman of parts from wherever it has come!”
”That is an apt phrase--where did you find it--'die like gentleman, but not live like men'?”
”I don't know, it just came from thinking and reading about them--so much was fine, and so much--foolish.”
”Yes--and you think we are growing also to that stage in England?
Perhaps you are right; we want some great national danger to pull us together.”
”You will rust out otherwise, and it will be such a pity.”
”You think we are good enough to keep?”
”In your highest development--like Her Ladys.h.i.+p--you are, I should think, the best things for a country in the world.”
She knew he was drawing her out and was very pleased to be so drawn.
”Tell me about us--what have we that is good?”
”You have a sense of values--you know what is worth having--You have had hundreds of years to acquire the quality of looking ahead. No person of the cla.s.ses from which the Radical statesmen are drawn has naturally the quality of looking ahead; he has to be told about it, and then get it if he can--it is not in his blood because his forebears only had to s.n.a.t.c.h what they could for themselves and their families day by day, and were not required to observe any broad horizon.”
”How very true--you are a student of heredity then, Miss Bush?”
”Yes--it explains everything. I examine it in myself; I am always combating ordinary and cramping instincts which I find I have got.”
”How interesting!”
”No common Radical could be a successful foreign minister, for instance--unless perhaps he were a Jew like Disraeli--but they have sense enough to know that themselves, and always choose a gentleman, don't they?”