His Grace — page 52: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

46 HIS GRACE. shadow me, if he can, and she thinks I should be an ass to submit to it. So do I, for the matter of that.” Being unable to concur in such sentiments, I held my tongue, and he went on to eulogize his mother in terms which were half painful, half comical, to a disin- terested hearer. He did not stop at declaring her to be the cleverest woman of his acquaintance; as I ama sinful man, he proceeded to praise her personal beauty, the remarkable youthfulness of her appearance, and her unerring good taste! Often and often have I wondered whether Hurstbourne’s filial affection and admiration were in reality what they were ostensibly. ‘One knows how a man will take you into his stables and defiantly forestall criticism. by claiming points for his horses which are the very points that they lack. “You im- agine,” he seems to say, “that that animal is not well ribbed back, or that the foreleg upon which you have fixed your eye shows signs of a splint; but let me tell you that you are utterly and ridiculously mistaken.” Perhaps one thinks that he ought to know best; in- any case, one refrains from saying what one has been going to say. But, upon the whole, I really do believe that Hurstbourne was sincere. It is his nature to be like that; his geese are swans; the people whom he loves cannot do wrong, and I am afraid also that the few people whom he hates cannot do right. It was plain enough that he hated his cousin. He did not say so; but he gave me to understand.as much, and I gathered that the large and influential assem- blage which he was about to entertain was intended to be in some sort a slap in the face to the neighboring _ potentate. He furnished me with a list—and a very imposing list,it was—of the guests who were to arrive Gomichboo cS (GC 0)