Not in externals; therein he
conformed correctly to type. His hair was faintly reminiscent of
Houbigant, and at the other end of him his shoes exhaled the right
SOUP?ON of harness-room; his socks compelled one's attention
without losing one's respect; and his attitude in repose had just
that suggestion of Whistler's mother, so becoming in the really
young. It was within that the trouble lay, if trouble it could be
accounted, which marked him apart from his fellows. The Duke was
religious. Not in any of the ordinary senses of the word; he took
small heed of High Church or Evangelical standpoints, he stood
outside of all the movements and missions and cults and crusades
of the day, uncaring and uninterested. Yet in a mystical-
practical way of his own, which had served him unscathed and
unshaken through the fickle years of boyhood, he was intensely and
intensively religious. His family were naturally, though
unobtrusively, distressed about it. "I am so afraid it may affect
his bridge," said his mother.
The Duke sat in a pennyworth of chair in St. James's Park,
listening to the pessimisms of Belturbet, who reviewed the
existing political situation from the gloomiest of standpoints.
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