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the Mudge-Jervises. Well, they were getting along quite happily, and their married life was one continuous exchange of picture-postcards; and then one day they were thrown together on some neutral ground where foursomes and washerwomen overlapped, and discovered that they were hopelessly divided on the Fiscal Question. They have thought it best to separate, and she isto have the custody of the Persian kittens for nine months in the year—they go back to him for the winter, when she is abroad. There you have the material for a tragedy drawn straight from life—and the piece could be called The Price They Paid for Empire.’ And of course one would have to work in studies of the struggle of hereditary tendency against environment and all that sort of thing. The woman’s father could have been an Envoy to some of the smaller German Courts; that’s where she’d get her passion for visiting the poor, in spite of the most careful upbringing.
C’est le premier pa qui compte,
as the cuckoo said when it swallowed its foster-parent. That, I think, is quite clever.”
    â€œAnd the wolves?”
    â€œOh, the wolves would be a sort of elusive undercurrent in the background that would never be satisfactorily explained. After all, life teems with things that have no earthly reason. And whenever the characters could think of nothing brilliant to say about marriage or the War Office, they could open a window and listen to the howling of the wolves. But that would be very seldom.”

REGINALD ON TARIFFS
    I’ M not going to discuss the Fiscal Question (said Reginald); I wish to be original. At the same time, I think one suffers more than one realizes from the system of free imports. I should like, for instance, a really prohibitive duty put upon the partner who declares on a weak red suit and hopes for the best. Even a free outlet for compressed verbiage doesn’t balance matters. And I think there should be a sort of bounty-fed export (is that the right expression?) of the people who impress on you that you ought to take life seriously. There are only two classes that really can’t help taking life seriously—schoolgirls of thirteen and Hohenzollerns; they might be exempt. Albanians come under another heading; they take life whenever they get the opportunity. The one Albanian that I was ever on speaking terms with was rather a decadent example. He was a Christian and a grocer, and I don’t fancy he had ever killed anybody. I didn’t like to question him on the subject—that showed my delicacy. Mrs. Nicorax says I have no delicacy; she hasn’t forgiven me about the mice. You see, when I wasstaying down there, a mouse used to cake-walk about my room half the night, and none of their silly patent traps seemed to take its fancy as a bijou residence, so I determined to appeal to the better side of it—which with mice is the inside. So I called it Percy, and put little delicacies down near its hole every night, and that kept it quiet while I read Max Nordau’s
Degeneration
and other reproving literature, and went to sleep. And now she says there is a whole colony of mice in that room.
    That isn’t where the indelicacy comes in. She went out riding with me, which was entirely her own suggestion, and as we were coming home through some meadows she made a quite unnecessary attempt to see if her pony would jump a rather messy sort of brook that was there. It wouldn’t. It went with her as far as the water’s edge, and from that point Mrs. Nicorax went on alone. Of course I had to fish her out from the bank, and my riding-breeches are not cut with a view to salmon-fishing—it’s rather an art even to ride in them. Her habit-skirt was one of those open questions that need not be adhered to in emergencies, and on this occasion it remained behind in some water-weeds. She wanted me to fish about for that too, but I felt I had done enough Pharaoh’s daughter