"You know him very well; do you? Dear, dear, dear!"
"I don't know him at all, duke, but I once went to hear him preach. He's one of those men who string words together, and do a good deal of work with a cambric pocket-handkerchief."
"A gentleman?" asked the duke.
"About as like a gentleman as you're like an archbishop," said Lady Glencora.
This tickled the duke amazingly. "He, he, he;—I don't see why I shouldn't be like an archbishop. If I hadn't happened to be a duke, I should have liked to be an archbishop. Both the archbishops take rank of me. I never quite understood why that was, but they do. And these things never can be altered when they're once settled. It's quite absurd, now-a-days, since they've cut the archbishops down so terribly. They were princes once, I suppose, and had great power. But it's quite absurd now, and so they must feel it. I have often thought about that a good deal, Glencora."
"And I think about poor Mrs. Arch, who hasn't got any rank at all."
"A great prelate having a wife does seem to be an absurdity," said Madame Max, who had passed some years of her life in a Catholic country.
"And the man is a cad;—is he?" asked the duke.
"A Bohemian Jew, duke,—an impostor who has come over here to make a fortune. We hear that he has a wife in Prague, and probably two or three elsewhere. But he has got poor little Lizzie Eustace and all her money into his grasp, and they who know him say that he's likely to keep it."
"Dear, dear, dear!"