"It is always as well here to know who one's next neighbour is,"
continued Fitzalbert, "for this is not one of those snug parties where
one can do or say what one pleases without observation." "How do you
mean?" asked Germain. "Why, Lady Boreton encourages these literary
poachers on the manors, or rather _manners_ of high life; she gives a
sort of right of free chase to all cockney sportsmen to wing one's
follies in a double-barrelled duodecimo, or hunt one's eccentricities
through a hot-pressed octavo. Not that they are, generally speaking,
very formidable shots--they often bring down a different bird from the
one they aimed at, and sometimes shut their eyes and blaze away at the
whole covey; which last is, after all, the best way. Their coming here
to pick out individuals is needless trouble. Do you know the modern
recipe for a finished picture of fashionable life? Let a gentleman_ly_
man, with a gentleman_ly_ style, take of foolscap paper a few quires;
stuff them well with high-sounding titles--dukes and duchesses, lords
and ladies, _ad libitum_. Then open the peerage at random, pick a
supposititious author out of one page of it, and fix the imaginary
characters upon some of the rest; mix it all up with quantum suff. of
puff, and the book is in a second edition before ninety-nine readers out
of a hundred have found out the one is as little likely to have written,
as the others to have done what is attributed to them."
Again--here is a picture of the guests: "Captains that have been to the
North Pole; chemists who can extract ice from caloric; transatlantic
travellers and sedentary bookworms; some authors, who own to anonymous
publications they have never written; and others who are suspected of
those they deny; besides the usual quantum of young ladies and
gentlemen, who rest their claims to distinction upon the traditionary
deeds of their great grandfathers."
* * * * *