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Rh ; but you do not mean to say that that is always the rule?"

"Alas! no," I said, "the dinners are sometimes as bad as the company is dull, and then we are regularly bored. However," I added, "when a gentleman gives a feast he generally takes care to secure the presence of some literary or scientific celebrity, or some person of a rank superior to that of the generality of his guests; and the satisfaction we get by merely sitting at the table with such a superior person, though he may be neither entertaining nor handsome, is a sufficient compensation for bad cookery and general discomfort. Indeed," I assured Lily, "many persons who have no pretensions to wit or learning themselves acquire a sort of prestige for both from the mere circumstance of being able to boast of having dined in company with some literary lions; and I know some otherwise not very distinguished men who are very much looked up to in consequence of its being known that they have occasionally sat at the same table with a lord."

I could not get this beautiful water-nymph to see these things from the true British point of view. In fact I thought I saw something like an expression of contempt steal over her charming features, and I fear I rather blushed and betrayed some awkwardness at having to apologize as it were for some of our most cherished English habits and ideas, which in England need no apology, but which I felt could not appear in the same light to a Colymbian.

If any such feeling possessed Lily she took good care to give no expression to it in words, but merely said:—

"I fear I should be quite incapable of appreciating the pleasure of your dinner parties under the most favourable conditions of agreeable company and nice 5em