"That is too prettily said for an Oxford Methodist. 'Tis a reminiscence of the soldier's manners. When the duke led me out for the second dance at the Duchess of Norfolk's ball he was pleased to compliment my housekeeping. 'I hear your ladyship's is the pleasantest house in town,' he said, 'but am I never to know more of it than hearsay?' On which I dropped my best curtsey, and told him that my house with all it contained was at his feet, and I had not finished my chocolate next morning before his royal highness's aide-de-camp was announced, who came to tell me his master would accept any invitation I was civil enough to send him."
"And this trivial conquest made you happy?"
"Sure it pleased me as any other toy would have done. 'Twas something to think about—whom I should invite—how I should dress my table. I strewed it from end to end with cut roses, brought up from Essex this morning, with the dew on their petals. Their perfume had a flavour of the East—some valley in Cashmere—till a succession of smoking roasts polluted the atmosphere. I had a mind to imitate mediæval feasts, and give the prince a pie full of live singing birds, but one hardly knows how the birds might behave when the pie was cut."
"You had one sensible man among your guests, I doubt."
"Merci du compliment—pour les autres. Pray who was this paragon?"
"Lord Dunkeld."
"You know Lord Dunkeld?"
"He was my intimate friend some years ago."
"Before you left off having any friends but Methodists?"
"Before I knew that life was too serious a thing for trifling friendships."