Page:By order of the Czar.djvu/135

BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 123 The children — there were three of them — were not allowed to interfere with the social pleasures of the house ; they had good nurses and well-arranged apartments, and only now and then were permitted to be in evidence in drawing or dining room. Their mother visited them once a day, and romped with them or read them stories, or heard their lessons, and at night, when she was at home, they said their little prayers at her knee. They came to dinner at birthdays or at Christmas, they went out in the carriage for a daily airing, and sometimes into the park, wonderfully dressed, and with French servants picturesquely attired. Walter, while he said Jenny was fond of showing off the children when they went out, liked to see the display, and was a happy well-to-do fellow, with a good word for most people, rarely a bad word for anybody, except once in a way, when the attentions to his wife of some snob or other, who did not understand her free and frank manner, aroused his marital dignity, and on one occasion he actually slapped a fellow's face, and then called him out. This was in the first year of his marriage. He had since learned what a man must put up with, having a pretty and charmingly-dressed wife, who, assured of her position, is somewhat too fearless in what she says and does before strangers.

Under these conditions of domestic administration it is hardly necessary to say that the dinner to which Walter had invited Swynford, and Mrs. Milbanke Philip Forsyth, was an adequate, pleasant and cheery repast; no fuss, no formality — as Walter said, en famille — eight o'clock, bright fires (it was the last week in March, and the English Spring was setting in with its accustomed severity), two good dishes among the kickshaws, a bottle of dry champagne, no nonsense about whitewash after dinner, but a drop of Margeaux and as quickly as might be afterwards a good cigar and a thimbleful of black coffee, and join the ladies in half an hour.