Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/278

246 their semi-inferior position. Except at Damascus, they were round pegs in square holes. Burton was not of the stuff to make a good consul; and the same, relatively speaking, may be said of his wife. They were both of them in a false position from the start.

The following extract from a letter which Isabel wrote home shortly after her arrival in Brazil is of interest in this connexion:

"I dare say some of my friends do not know what a consul is. I am sure I had not the remotest idea until I came here, and then I find it is very much what Lady Augusta thinks in The Bramleighs, written by a much-respected member of our cloth, Charles Lever, consul at Trieste. 'Isn't a consul,' she asks, 'a horrid creature that lives in a seaport, and worries merchant seamen, and imprisons people who have no passports? Papa always wrote to the consul about getting heavy baggage through the custom-house; and when our servants quarrelled with the porters, or the hotel people, it was the consul sent some of them to jail. But you are aware, darling, he isn't a creature one knows. They are simply impossible, dear—impossible! The moment a gentleman touches an emploi it's all over with him—from that hour he becomes the Customs creature, or the consul, or the factor, or whatever it be, irrevocably. Do you know that is the only way to keep men of family out of small official life? We should see them keeping lighthouses if it were not for the obloquy.' Now, alas! dear, as you are well aware, I do know what a consul is, and what it is to be settled down in a place that my Irish maid calls the 'end of God's speed,' whatever that