"Because he's bored at home! Youth is, after all, only good spirits. If you laugh you are young, but your wife don't make you laugh; you pay her bills, and go with her to a state ball, and sit opposite to her at dinner, and when you catch a cold she is always there to say, 'My dear, didn't I tell you so?' but I defy any man living to recall any hour of his existence in which his wife ever made him laugh!"
"And yet you wanted me to ask married people together."
"Because I wanted it all to be highly proper and deadly dull. Surrenden has got a sort of reputation of being a kind of Orleans Club."
"And yet you complain of being bored in it!"
"One is always bored in one's own house! One can never take in to dinner the person one likes."
"You make up to yourself for the deprivation after dinner!"
"My lady's very ruffled to-day," says Usk to Mr. Wootton. "I don't know which of her doves has turned out a fighting-cock."
"That reminds me," observes Mr. Wootton. "I wanted to ask you, did you know that Gervase, when he was Lord Baird, was very much au mieux with Madame Sabaroff? I remember hearing long ago from Russians——"
Lady Usk interrupts the great man angrily: "Very much au mieux! What barbarous polygot language for a great critic like you! Must you have the assistance of bad grammar in two tongues to take away my friend's reputation?"
Lord Usk chuckles. "Reputations aren't taken away so easily; they're very hardy plants nowadays, and will stand a good deal of bad weather."