“Is it a very august position?” she asked.
“Oh dear no,” Lord Lambeth smiled.
“I should think it would be very grand”—she serenely kept it up, as the female American, he judged, would always keep anything up—“to possess simply by an accident of birth the right to make laws for a great nation.”
“Ah, but one doesn’t make laws. There’s a lot of humbug about it.”
“I don’t believe that,” the girl unconfusedly declared. “It must be a great privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right way—from a high point of view—it would be very inspiring.”
“The less one thinks of it the better, I guess!” Lord Lambeth after a moment returned.
“I think it’s tremendous”—this at least she kept up; and on another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he felt a little the burden of her earnestness.
But he took it good-humouredly. “Do you want to buy up their leases?”
“Well—have you got any ‘livings’?” she demanded as if the word were rich and rare.
“Oh I say!” he cried. “Have you got a pet clergyman looking out?” But she made him plead guilty to his having, in prospect, a castle; he confessed to but one. It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into a few pleasant facts about it and into pronouncing it really very jolly. Bessie listened with great interest, declaring she would give the world to see such a place. To which he charmingly made answer: “It would be awfully kind of you to come and stay there, you know.” It was not inconvenient to him meanwhile that Percy Beaumont hadn’t happened to hear him make this genial remark.