WETHERELL
Easy now, my only love: don't hurt Edward's little feelings. He is a notorious Carolian specialist, a quasi-Cavalier, a pre-Jacobite, a seventeenth-centurion, and all that.
MRS. WETHERELL
Oh! a Royalist, a White Rose man? I never dreamed it.
CLAY
Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. Only, you see, I honestly like the rogue; people don't understand him. If I had your husband's leisure, I should never rest until I had moused in the archives at first hand, and said the authentic last good word for him. There would be no end of fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine pair.
WETHERELL
That green bird on your boot will choke himself. It is wonderful how tame they are!—I thought you knew more than anybody alive, on that subject, these ten years.
CLAY
I might say with Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: "I have thought more than I have read, and read more than I have written."