“Just so, Cutty, a very poor one. I give you my word of honor I have learned more diplomacy beside the drawing-room fire than I ever acquired in the pages of the blue-books. You see it's a quite different school of fence they practise; the thrusts are different, and the guards are different. A day for furs essentially, a day for furs,” broke he in, as he drew on a coat lined with sable, and profusely braided and ornamented. “What was I saying? where were we?”
“You were talking of women, my Lord.”
“The faintest tint of scarlet in the under vest—it was a device of the Regent's in his really great day—is always effective in cold, bright, frosty weather. The tint is carried on to the cheek, and adds brilliancy to the eye. In duller weather a coral pin in the cravat will suffice; but, as David Wilkie used to say, 'Nature must have her bit of red.'”
“I wish you would finish what you were saying about women, my Lord. Your remarks were full of originality.”
“Finish! finish, Cutty! It would take as many volumes as the 'Abridgement of the Statutes' to contain one-half of what I could say about them; and, after all, it would be Sanscrit to you.” His Lordship now placed his hat on his head, slightly on one side. It was the “tigerism” of a past period, and which he could no more abandon than he could give up the jaunty swagger of his walk, or the bland smile which he kept ready for recognition.
“I have not, I rejoice to say, arrived at that time of life when I can affect to praise bygones; but I own, Cutty, they did everything much better five-and-twenty years ago than now. They dined better, they dressed better, they drove better, they turned out better in the field and in the park, and they talked better.”
“How do you account for this, my Lord?”
“Simply in this way, Cutty. We have lowered our standard in taste just as we have lowered our standard for the army. We take fellows five feet seven into grenadier companies now; that is, we admit into society men of mere wealth,—the banker, the brewer, the railway director, and the rest of them; and with these people we admit their ways, their tastes, their very expressions. I know it is said that we gain in breadth; yet, as I told Lord Cocklethorpe (the mot had its success),—what we gain in breadth, said I, we lose in height. Neat, Cutty, was n't it? As neat as a mot well can be in our clumsy language.”
And with this, and a familiar “Bye-bye,” he strolled away, leaving Cutbill to practise before the glass such an imitation of him as might serve, at some future time, to convulse with laughter a select and admiring audience.