Hilda Was
Presented First, While I Tried To Fire My Courage By Thinking Of The
Puritan Fathers, And Plymouth Rock, And The Boston Tea-Party, And
The Battle Of Bunker Hill.
Then my turn came.
I murmured some
words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked
self-respecting sort of way. Then we talked, - at least the duke and
Lady Veratrum talked. Hilda said a few blameless words, such as
befitted an untitled English virgin in the presence of the nobility;
while I maintained the probationary silence required by Pythagoras
of his first year's pupils. My idea was to observe this first duke
without uttering a word, to talk with the second (if I should ever
meet a second), to chat with the third, and to secure the fourth for
Francesca to take home to America with her.
Of course I know that dukes are very dear, but she could afford any
reasonable sum, if she found one whom she fancied; the principal
obstacle in the path is that tiresome American lawyer with whom she
considers herself in love. I have never gone beyond that first
experience, however, for dukes in England are as rare as snakes in
Ireland. I can't think why they allow them to die out so, - the
dukes, not the snakes. If a country is to have an aristocracy, let
there be enough of it, say I, and make it imposing at the top, where
it shows most, especially since, as I understand it, all that
Victoria has to do is to say, 'Let there be dukes,' and there are
dukes.
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