"And he isn't far wrong," sang out Lord Bobby; "if you don't take care you'll be stung to death by your own tongue, like the crocodile or the scorpion or some other old chappie. You should have seen a girl I took in to dinner last week; all through dinner she kept saying, 'Oh, Lord Bobby, how clever you are!' And she never said anything else. Now that is the sort of conversation that men like; it is far better than the dizzying, fizzying stuff that brilliant women treat us to."
"Don't you like the girls whom you think clever?" asked Violet.
"I like the girls who think me clever a long sight better; and I don't believe that this is by any means a peculiar taste."
"Young people think and talk too much about what they like and dislike," said Lady Wrexham, rising from the table, "when I was a girl I knew what people were related to each other, and which families were old and which new; but I did not bother my head about who was attractive and who was amiable and who was neither."
"If you have nothing special to do this afternoon, Thistletown," said Lord Wrexham, "I wish you would drive Madderley in the dog-cart to Sunny Hill; I particularly want him to see the view from there, it is such a fine one and also so typical of this part of the country."
"I could have better shared a better plan," replied Bobby; "but my obliging nature cannot say him nay."
"You can upset him and break all his bones for being so rude to me at lunch," suggested Isabel.
"That would do him no good. You may break, you may shatter his bones if you will, but the outward signs of an overweening vanity and a most unlovable disposition will cling to him still."
Then the party dispersed, and Isabel went with her lover to see some model cottages which he had just built, and which he was particularly anxious to show to her. She listened patiently while he explained all the improvements, and then she said: "I wonder if happiness is to be found in such things as subsoils and artesian wells."
Lord Wrexham looked at his cottages with satisfaction. "Health is to be found in them, and health is a constituent part of happiness."