"Of course it is easy enough to copy and profit by inventions and improvements after somebody else has made them."
The bishop stopped, and sipped his glass of Contrexeville, looking with a pleased smile at the young people before him.
No one could talk with a more accurate and sustained flow of English than Lord Camborne. He knew it. The public knew it, and he knew that the public knew it.
From some men such a sustained monologue would have been excessively tedious, even though the people to whom it was addressed were, like Miss Rose Dartle, "anxious for information." In the bishop, however, there was such a blandness and suavity—he was such a handsome old man, and had cultivated the grand manner to such perfection—that he really was able, on all occasions, to indulge in his favourite amusement without boring anybody at all. He was, in short, one of the few men in Europe who could enjoy the pleasure of hearing himself talk at considerable length without an uneasy feeling that, in giving way to his ruling passion, he was not alienating friends.
"I see, father!" Lady Constance said as the stately old gentleman concluded his rounded periods. But there was a slight note of indifference in her voice. The bishop did not hear it, Lord Hayle did not hear it, but the duke detected it with a slight sensation of surprise. His senses were sharpened to apprehend every inflection in the voice of the girl he loved. And he wondered that she, apparently, was a little bored by the bishop's explanation.
He did not realise, being a young man, and one who had enjoyed a long minority, and had known but little of his parents, that, even though a prophet may sometimes have honour in his own country, his children do not always pay him his due meed of recognition when he is, so to speak, "unbuttoned and at home."
The duke had never heard the story of the angry old gentleman who was threatening two little boys, who had thrown some orange peel at him, with the imminent arrival of a policeman upon the other side of the road. "Garn!" said the little boys in chorus. "Why, that's farver!"
The duke himself was intensely interested in the bishop's logical and singularly powerful exposition of socialistic fallacies.
He had been uneasy for a long time now. He had had an alarming suspicion that the arguments of Fabian Rose and his companions were unanswerable, and, on that very afternoon, he had been specially struck by the vigour and force of the concluding chapter of Arthur Burnside's book.