“Different countries have different customs, dear Victor, and you must never judge our self-controlled commonwealth from the standpoint of your bloodthirsty democracy. It is not so much that our aristocracy is unlike yours, but that your lower classes are utterly different from our own.”
“Anyhow, dear Lionel, I have made up my mind to go over and see things for myself.”
“Ah, that’s a good fellow! Come along, and we will do all that lies in our power to make you happy. You won’t be bored, I declare; and your visit over here will at all events furnish you with some topics of conversation on your return to Paris.”
And Victor de Laumel arrived next day in the afternoon, after a lovely crossing in his yacht (for the Calais-Dover had ceased running, and he was the first foreigner who had landed in England since the storm). He stood on the Charing Cross platform as God made him; it having occurred to him that the Londoners might be offended at his Parisian outfit and at his disregarding the new fashion of denudation. On the day following his arrival, his first visit was to Montagu Vane; but on his arrival at his house, he found to his great surprise that it had been pulled down. He inquired after the little _dilettante_ from several of his friends, on his way to Selby House, but quite in vain, for no one could tell him anything; and he thought that London Society had certainly not improved, if it could forget the existence of its arbiter in all matters of art. He did not, however, ponder long over such questions; he had come over to judge impartially the London reforms, and he was not going to allow his prejudices to influence him; so he made the most of his short stay in the capital, seeing everything, escorted either by Lionel or by Sinclair, who, by the way, seemed to him to have become dreadfully dull. His rambles with Danford rather amused him, although he saw no novelty in the admission to fashionable households of these little truth-tellers, for this had been done before in mediæval times; but what baffled him was the good-fellowship with which the Upper Ten appeared to treat these little buffoons. He dined at the dining-halls, attended meetings at the ex-clubs in Pall Mall, went to tournaments, plays, even drove in a chariot with Tom Hornsby, and above all admired Gwendolen beyond expression. But, after he had done these things and thrown himself body and soul in the spirit of the new civilisation, he came to the conclusion that it was all very well for a race which took things _au serieux_, but that it would never do for Parisians; and he could not for one instant believe that on the borders of the Seine political rancour could ever be uprooted and replaced by love and charity, because one man had seen another in nature’s garb.