“Not one crown of it,—not a single bajocco, as I am a Christian knight and a true gentleman. I need it all, if it were twice as much. If we incur the anger of the Pope and the Sacred College,—if we risk the thunders of the Vatican,—let us have the worldly consolation of a full purse.”
“I advised the measure on wiser grounds, sir. It was not fair and just that a set of lazy friars should be leading lives of indolence and abundance in the midst of a hard-worked and ill-fed peasantry.”
“Quite true; and on these wise grounds, as you call them, we have rooted them out. We only wish that the game were more plenty, for the sport amuses us vastly.” And he clapped Stubber familiarly on the shoulder, and laughed heartily at his jest.
It was in this happy frame of mind that Stubber always liked to leave his master; and so, promising to attend to the different subjects discussed between them, he bowed and withdrew.
CHAPTER XLIX. SOCIAL DIPLOMACIES
“What an insufferable bore, dear Princess!” sighed Sir Horace, as he opened the square-shaped envelope that contained his Royal Highnesses invitation to dinner.
“I mean to be seriously indisposed,” said Madame de Sabloukoff; “one gets nothing but chagrin in intercourse with petty Courts.”
“Like provincial journals, they only reproduce what has appeared in the metropolitan papers, and give you old gossip for fresh intelligence.”
“Or, worse again, ask you to take an interest in their miserable 'localisms,'—the microscopic contentions of insect life.”