Where are we, then ?' 'We don't shine with the small sword.' 'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.' 'We've had clever Irishmen.' 'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with him ?' 'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found wary enough.' My lord hummed.

'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over steel.' 'He can be dangerous.' The word struck on something, and rang.
Mrs.Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips.

Her travelling eye met Aminta's and passed it.
'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded ?' said Mrs.Pagnell.
'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs.Lawrence ran out her voluble assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at school under shadow of the master.
She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a lesson?
They want it.' His answer was unheard by Aminta.

She gathered from Mrs.Lawrence's pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild at his games.
My lord hummed again.

'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing.