And all the while there was running through his head Kipling's line: "_And the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins_." It was true, he decided; though the novels he had read had led him to believe otherwise.

His idea, for which the novels were responsible, had been that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes.

It was all right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable.

Yet the novels were wrong.

Here was a proof of it.