'Why do they let the men smoke, then?' said the squire. 'A pretty style o' courtship. Come, sit by my hearth, ma'am; I 'll be your chimney— faugh! dirty rascals!'
Janet said: 'I rather like the smell of cigars.'
'Like what you please, my dear—he'll be a lucky dog,' the squire approved her promptly, and asked me if I smoked.
I was not a stranger to the act, I confessed.
'Well'—he took refuge in practical philosophy—'a man must bring some dirt home from every journey: only don't smoke me out, mercy's sake.'
Here was a hint of Janet's influence with him, and of what he expected from my return to Riversley.
Peterborough informed me that he suffered persecution over the last glasses of Port in the evening, through the squire's persistent inquiries as to whether a woman had anything to do with my staying so long abroad. 'A lady, sir?' quoth Peterborough. 'Lady, if you like,' rejoined the squire. 'You parsons and petticoats must always mince the meat to hash the fact.' Peterborough defended his young friend Harry's moral reputation, and was amazed to hear that the squire did not think highly of a man's chastity. The squire acutely chagrined the sensitive gentleman by drawling the word after him, and declaring that he tossed that kind of thing into the women's wash-basket. Peterborough, not without signs of indignation, protesting, the squire asked him point- blank if he supposed that Old England had been raised to the head of the world by such as he. In fine, he favoured Peterborough with a lesson in worldly views. 'But these,' Peterborough said to me, 'are not the views, dear Harry—if they are the views of ladies of any description, which I take leave to doubt—not the views of the ladies you and I would esteem. For instance, the ladies of this household.' My aunt Dorothy's fate was plain.
In reply to my grandfather's renewed demand to know whether any one of those High-Dutch women had got hold of me, Peterborough said: 'Mr. Beltham, the only lady of whom it could be suspected that my friend Harry regarded her with more than ordinary admiration was Hereditary-Princess of one of the ancient princely Houses of Germany.' My grandfather thereupon said, 'Oh!' pushed the wine, and was stopped.
Peterborough chuckled over this 'Oh!' and the stoppage of further questions, while acknowledging that the luxury of a pipe would help to make him more charitable. He enjoyed the Port of his native land, but he did, likewise, feel the want of one whiff or so of the less restrictive foreigner's pipe; and he begged me to note the curiosity of our worship of aristocracy and royalty; and we, who were such slaves to rank, and such tyrants in our own households,—we Britons were the great sticklers for freedom! His conclusion was, that we were not logical. We would have a Throne, which we would not allow the liberty to do anything to make it worthy of rational veneration: we would have a peerage, of which we were so jealous that it formed almost an assembly of automatons; we would have virtuous women, only for them to be pursued by immoral men. Peterborough feared, he must say, that we were an inconsequent people. His residence abroad had so far unhinged him; but a pipe would have stopped his complainings.
Moved, perhaps, by generous wine, in concert with his longing for tobacco, he dropped an observation of unwonted shrewdness; he said: 'The squire, my dear Harry, a most honourable and straightforward country gentleman, and one of our very wealthiest, is still, I would venture to suggest, an example of old blood that requires—I study race—varying, modifying, one might venture to say, correcting; and really, a friend with more privileges than I possess, would or should throw him a hint that no harm has been done to the family by an intermixture . . . old blood does occasionally need it—you know I study blood—it becomes too coarse, or, in some cases, too fine. The study of the mixture of blood is probably one of our great physical problems.'