"I know Lord Ambrose Thistletown by name, of course, well," said Paul.
"It is a beastly see," continued Bobby, "all smoke and manufactures and working men, and things of that kind. They have offered him better ones, but he will stay on there because he thinks he can do more good among poor people than among rich ones; and I guess he is about right."
"That is very noble of him!"
"Oh! he is like that all through; a regular good sort, out and out; but his wife is simply awful. She is always worrying him to go to a place where there would be a bigger palace, and more swagger friends for her; and she is for ever preaching to the poor old man about the claims of birth, and the duties of rank, and rot of that sort."
"Poor Lord Ambrose!" said Isabel sympathetically.
"She is simply sickening," continued Bobby, "when she gets on her high horse, and rates the bishop for not properly fulfilling the duties of his position and the claims of his station; she feels those claims so strongly herself, she says, that she should consider it a sin to disregard them. She was the daughter of an archdeacon, you know," and Bobby chuckled to himself.
"She can't bear me," said Lady Esdaile, "she thinks I am worldly because I wear a fringe, and dance round-dances. And so she gives me a cheap and religious little book every time she meets me."
Lord Bobby clapped his hands with delight. "I know them," he cried. "The Mammon Worshippers and Outlandish Women are two of her 'choicest gifts in store'; but she has plenty of others for those who need them. What irritates me in the woman is that she is such a toady; she dismisses her servants without characters if she finds they are not strict teetotalers; and yet once, when that horrid Lord Watertight was regularly drunk at a party, she said it was his animal spirits only that carried him away, and that he was a most lovable young man. Spirits carried him away, I confess, but they were vegetable and not animal ones."
"That was just like her," said Lady Esdaile.
"She not only believes that the king can do no wrong, but that the peerage can do no wrong, either—which is carrying a good principle to an untenable extreme," continued Lord Bobby. "But did you ever hear the poem that Lady Eleanor Gregory wrote about her?"