HE Great Ones of the earth do not come our way much down at Southam Parva. Our Member's wife is an "Honorable," and most of us, in referring to her, make express mention of that rank; moreover she comes very seldom. In the main our lot lies among the undistinguished, and our table of precedence is employed in determining the dividing lines between "Esquire." "Mr.," and plain "John Jones"—a humble, though no doubt a subtle, inquiry into the gradations of Society. So I must confess to feeling a thrill when I read Mrs. Thistleton's invitation to dinner at the Manor. Thistleton is lord of the manor—by purchase, not by inheritance—and lives in the old house, proceeding every day to town, where he has a fine practice as a solicitor (Bowes, Thistleton, and Kent) in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Mrs. Thistleton and the children (there are eight, ranging from Tom, nineteen, to Molly, seven, so that the practice needs to be fine) are, however, quite country-folk. Indeed Mrs. Thistleton comes of a county family—in a county situated, I must not say judiciously but perhaps luckily, at the other end of England from ours; distance prevents cavil in such matters, and, practically speaking, Mrs. Thistleton can say what she pleases about her parental stock, besides exhibiting some highly respectable coat-of-armored silver to back her discreet vaunts. Mrs. Thistleton is always discreet; indeed she is, in my opinion, a woman of considerable talent, and the way in which she dealt with the Princess—with the problem of the Princess—confirmed the idea I had of her.
The mention of the Princess brings me back to the card of invitation, though I must add, in a minor digression, that the Thistletons are the only people in Southam Parva who employ printed cards of invitation—the rest of us would not get through a hundred in a lifetime, and therefore write notes. The invitation-card, then, sent to me by Mrs. Thistleton was headed as follows: "To have the honor of meeting Her Royal Highness the Princess Vera of Boravia." Subsequent knowledge taught me that the "Royal" was an embellishment of Mrs. Thistleton's—justifiable for aught I know, since the Princess had legitimate pretensions to the throne, though her immediate line was not at this time in occupation of it—but never employed by the Princess herself. However I think Mrs. Thistleton was quite right to do the thing handsomely, and I should have gone even without the "Royal," so there was no real deception. All of us who were invited went: the Rector and his wife, the Doctor and his wife, old Mrs. Marsfold (the Major-General had, unfortunately, died the year before), Miss Dunlop (of the Elms), and Charley Miles (of the Stock Exchange).
From what I have said already it will be evident that I am no authority, yet I feel safe in declaring that never was etiquette more elaborately observed at any party—I don't care where. One of Thistleton's clients was old Lord Ogleferry, and at Lord Ogleferry's he had once met a real princess (I apologize to Princess Vera for stumbling, in my insular way, into this invidious distinction, but, after all, Boravia is not a first-class Power). Everything that Lord and Lady Ogleferry had done and caused to be done for the real—the British—princess, Thistleton and Mrs. Thistleton did and caused to be done for Princess Vera; uncomfortable things some of them seemed to me to be, but Thistleton, over the wine after dinner, told us that they were perfectly correct. He also threw light on the Princess's visit. She had come to him as a client, wishing him to recover for her, not, as Charley Miles flippantly whispered to me, the throne of Boravia by force of arms, but a considerable private fortune at present impounded—or sequestrated, as Thistleton preferred to call it—by the de facto monarch of Boravia. "It's the case of the Orleans Princes over again," Thistleton observed, as he plied a dignified toothpick in such decent obscurity as his napkin afforded. This parallel with the Orleans Princes impressed us much—without, perhaps, illuminating all of us in an equal degree; and we felt that Charley betrayed a mercantile attitude of mind when he asked
"What's the figure?"
"Upward of two million francs," answered Thistleton.
I think we all wished we had pencil and paper; the Rector scribbled on the menu—I saw him do it—and got the translation approximately accurate. Imagination was left to play with the "upward."
"How much would you take for it—cash?" asked skeptical Charley.
"The matter is hardly as simple as that," said Thistleton, with a slight frown; and he added gravely: "We mustn't stay here any longer."