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 nobles 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."