Chapter 17

"A nice, well-behaved Royal Family." There had been several of them
in Europe for some time. An appreciable number of them had prided
themselves, even a shade ostentatiously, upon their domesticity.
The moral views of a few had been believed to border upon the
high principles inscribed in copy books. Some, however, had not.
A more important power or so had veered from the exact following
of these commendable axioms--had high-handedly behaved according
to their royal will and tastes. But what would you? With a nation
making proper obeisance before one from infancy; with trumpets
blaring forth joyous strains upon one's mere appearance on any
scene; with the proudest necks bowed and the most superb curtseys
swept on one's mere passing by, with all the splendour of the Opera
on gala night rising to its feet to salute one's mere entry into
the royal or imperial box, while the national anthem bursts forth
with adulatory and triumphant strains, only a keen and subtle
sense of humour, surely, could curb errors of judgment arising
from naturally mistaken views of one's own importance and value to
the entire Universe. Still there remained the fact that a number
of them WERE well-behaved and could not be complained of as bearing
any likeness to the bloodthirsty tyrants and oppressors of past
centuries.

The Head of the House of Coombe had attended the Court Functions
and been received at the palaces and castles of most of them.
For in that aspect of his character of which Mademoiselle Valle
had heard more than Dowson, he was intimate with well-known and
much-observed personages and places. A man born among those whose
daily life builds, as it passes, at least a part of that which
makes history and so records itself, must needs find companions,
acquaintances, enemies, friends of varied character, and if he
be, by chance, a keen observer of passing panoramas, can lack no
material for private reflection and the accumulation of important
facts.

That part of his existence which connected itself with the slice
of a house on the right side of the Mayfair street was but a
small one. A feature of the untranslatableness of his character
was that he was seen there but seldom. His early habit of crossing
the Channel frequently had gradually reestablished itself as years
passed. Among his acquaintances his "Saturday to Monday visits" to
continental cities remote or unremote were discussed with humour.
Possibly, upon these discussions, were finally founded the rumours
of which Dowson had heard but which she had impartially declined
to "credit". Lively conjecture inevitably figured largely in their
arguments and, when persons of unrestrained wit devote their
attention to airy