Lord Usk laughs. "Well, you know I think one's own house should be proper."
"No doubt," says Lord Brandolin, still more gravely. "To do one's morality vicariously is always so agreeable. Is Lady Waverley not here? She would save a hundred Sodoms, with a dozen Gomorrahs thrown in gratis."
"I thought you were in India," says his host, who does not care to pursue the subject of Lady Waverley's saintly qualifications for the salvation of cities or men.
"I went to India, but it bored me. I liked it when I was twenty-four; one likes so many things when one is twenty-four,—even champagne and a cotillion. How's Boom?"
"Very well; gone to his cousins' in Suffolk. Sure you won't have something to eat? They can bring it here in a minute if you like out-of-doors best."
"Quite sure, thanks. What a lovely place this is! I haven't seen it for years. I don't think there's another garden so beautiful in all England. After the great dust-plains and the sweltering humid heats of India, all this coolness and greenness are like Paradise."
Brandolin laughs languidly.
"Hot! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire! I should like to fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle of the Red Sea. Why do Englishmen perspire in every pore the moment the thermometer's above zero in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than any other Europeans?"
"You know I've sold Achnalorrie?" says his host, à propos de rien, but to him Achnalorrie seems à propos of everything in creation.
Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. "Ah! Quite right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn't find any way to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and graceful of God's creatures."