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 for all time. She has, however, a peculiarly discriminating nature. She recognises the inadequacy of two thousand a year to keep up the title of the barony of Drewitt."

"Some day she'll give you a little out of her own fifty thousand a year," suggested Beresford.

"My dear Richard," Drewitt drawled, "there is an obvious bourgeois trait in you. The Aunt is a woman of originality and imagination. She does much better than that. She collects and hurls at me all the heiresses for continents round. Such figures, such faces, such limbs, exist nowhere outside the imagination of a German caricaturist. Sometimes they have attached to them mammas, sometimes papas, which merely adds to the horror of the situation. I suppose," he continued resignedly, "it is due to the rise in democracy that the accent and waist-measurement of wealth should be as obvious as the Chiltern Hills."

"But surely there are some heiresses with attractions, Drew," suggested Richard.

Drewitt shook his head in profound dejection.

"None, my dear Richard, none. Even if there were, there would always be the relatives. Why is it," he demanded plaintively, "that we are endowed with relatives?"

"That's where birds and animals have the best of it," said Beresford, watching an impudent-looking sparrow on the window-ledge. "They don't even know their relatives."

"That, too, would have its disadvantages," said