"But what can I do?" he asked. "Only go into the city, and that is quite played out now. I have no head for business, and it would seem to me to be rather mean just to trade upon my name to get unsuspecting people to take shares in concerns; whereas if I marry an heiress it is a square game—I at least give her some return for her money."
"There is a great deal in what you say," I agreed.
"I told Cordelia—she is a cousin of mine, you know—I told her I would not have a very ugly one, and I should prefer that she should be a good, healthy brewer's daughter. Our family is over-well bred. You see, if you are going to sacrifice yourself to keep up your name, you may as well choose some one that will be of some ultimate use to it. Now we want a strain of thick red blood in our veins; ours is a great deal too blue. We are becoming reedy shaped, and more or less idiotic."
He said all this quite gravely. He had evidently studied the subject, and as I looked at him I felt he was perfectly right. If he represented the type of his race, it had certainly grown effete.
"I won't have an American," he continued. "They are intellectual companions before marriage, and they are generally so agreeable you don't notice how nervous and restless they are really, but I would not contemplate one as a wife. I must have a solid English cow-woman."
He stretched himself by my side and began pulling a bit of grass to pieces. His hands look transparent, and he has the most beautifully shaped filbert nails; his ears, on the contrary, are not perfect, but stick out like a monkey's.
"You see, I should always live my own life," he went on, lazily. "I worship the beautiful. The pagans' highest expression of beauty which moved the world was in sculpture—cold and pure marble of divine form. That awakened their emotions; one reads they had a number of emotions. The Renaissance people, to take a medium time, expressed themselves by painting glorious colors on flat canvas; they also had emotions. Those two arts now are more or less dead. At any rate, they have ceased to influence masses of people. Our great expression is music. We are moved by music. It gives us emotions en bloc—all of us—some by the tune of 'Tommy Atkins,' and others by Wagner. Well, all these three—sculpture, painting, and music—give me pleasure, but I should not want my cow duchess to understand any of them. I should want her to have numbers of chubby children and to fulfil her social duties, and never have to go into a rest-cure, or have a longing for sympathy."
I said a few "yeses" and "reallys" during this long speech, and he continued, like a mill grinding coffee:
"It don't do to over-breed. You are bound to turn out some toqués if not altogether idiotic, and then my sense of beauty is outraged by the freaks that happen in our shapes—you should see my two sisters, the plainest women in England. Now you give me joy to look at. You are quite beautiful, you know. I never saw any one with a nose as straight and finely cut as yours. Why do you keep putting your parasol so that I cannot see it?"
"One uses a parasol to keep off the sun, which is hot. Would you wish me to get a sunstroke to oblige you?" And I put down my parasol still lower.