“That cannot be the Duke of Cimicifugas,” thought I, “a man in a corduroy jacket, without a sign of a suite; probably it is a Banished Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin.”
But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. 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.
Chapter VIII. Tuppenny travels in London.
If one really wants to know London, one must live there for years and years.
This sounds like a reasonable and sensible statement, yet the moment it is made I retract it, as quite misleading and altogether too general.
We have a charming English friend who has not been to the Tower since he was a small boy, and begs us to conduct him there on the very next Saturday. Another has not seen Westminster Abbey for fifteen years, because he attends church at St. Dunstan's-in-the-East. Another says that he should like to have us 'read up' London in the red-covered Baedeker, and then show it to him, properly and systematically. Another, a flower of the nobility, confesses that he never mounted the top of an omnibus in the evening for the sake of seeing London after dark, but that he thinks it would be rather jolly, and that he will join us in such a democratic journey at any time we like.