Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/287

 He did what Lady Hilda told him to do; he always did when he and she were together; he was a simple, kindly, honest gentleman, who regarded England as the universe, and all the rest of the world as a mere accident. His sister's contempt for her country and his politics, her philosophy of indifferentism, her adoration of primitive art, her variable disdain, and her intellectual pharisaism had always seemed to him very wonderful, and not altogether comfortable; but he admired her in a hopeless kind of way, and it was not in his temper to puzzle over people's differences of opinion or character.

"Hilda thinks all the old dead fellows were gods, and she thinks all of us asses," he would say humbly. "I don't know, you know,—she's awfully clever. I never was. It may be so, only I never will believe that England is used up, as she says; and I like the east wind myself; and what she can see in those saints she's just bought, painted on their tiptoes, or in those old crooked pots;—but if she'd stayed in the country, and hunted twice a week all winter, you know she would not have been like that."