"Oh, I don't know! I suppose so." Here the respondent would simulate a slight boredom. "One will have to mix with the most impossible people, of course"—Lady Shaftesbury had won great popularity by insisting that, in a business so truly national, no class distinctions were to be drawn—"but anyhow it will fill up the off-days this winter."
Lady Shaftesbury herself, after some pretty deliberation, decided to enact the part of the Empress Maud, and escape on horseback from King Stephen of Blois. Mr. Colt and Mr. Isidore Bamberger together waited on Brother Copas with a request that he would write the libretto for this Episode.
"But it was only last week you turned me on to Episode VI—King Hal and the Emperor Charles the Fifth," Copas protested.
"We are hoping you will write this for us too," urged Mr. Colt. "It oughtn't to take you long, you know. To begin with, no one knows very much about that particular period."
"The less known the better, if we may trust the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A few realistic pictures of the diversions of the upper classes—"
"Hawking was one, I believe?" opined Mr. Colt.
"Yes, and another was hanging the poor by their heels over a smoky fire, and yet another was shutting them up in a close cell into which had been inserted a few toads and adders."
"Her ladyship suggests a hawking scene, in the midst of which she is surprised by King Stephen and his, er, myrmidons—if that be the correct term—"
"It is at least as old as Achilles."
"She escapes from him on horseback.… At this point she wants to know if we can introduce a water-jump."