One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
you will visit us, I hope.’
‘You we count on here, Lady Grace.’
It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this wellbred
woman; and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes
us to speculate. The lady resumed: ‘I value the favour. We’re
in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down there. We want enlivening.
If we had your set of musicians and talkers!’
Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort
of a compliment to a person she measured. Lady Grace also
was an amiable hostile reviewer. Each could see, to have cited
in the other, defects common to the lower species of the race,
admitting a superior personal quality or two; which might
be pleaded in extenuation; and if the apology proved too
effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it, under an
implied appeal to benevolence. When we have not a liking
for the creature whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we
are minutely just.
During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms,
Colney Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter
smoking, striding, emphasizing, but bearable, as the one
of the party who was not perpetually at the gape in laudation.
Colney was heard to say: ‘No doubt: the German is the
race the least mixed in Europe: it might challenge aboriginals
for that. Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia for knowledge,
the sausage for nutrition! How would you explain it?’
Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to
the insensately infantile interrogation.
He in turn was presently heard.
‘But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin. I must
beg of you you write it down. It is orally incomprehensible
to Continentals.’
‘We are Islanders!’ Colney shrugged in languishment.
‘Oh, you do great things …’ Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness,
making his voice a musical intimation of the smallness
of the things.
‘We build great houses, to employ our bricks’
‘No, Colney, to live in,’ said Victor.
‘Scarcely long enough to warm them.’
‘What do you … fiddle!’
‘They are not Hohenzollerns !’
‘It is true,’ Dr. Schlesien called. ‘No, but you learn discipline;
you build. I say wid you, not Hohenzollerns you build!
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