Himmel, it is too hot to eat great dinners and to vear clothes like a monkey-jack." "Like a what ?" gasped the Baroness.
To hear the Baron von Blitzenberg decry the paraphernalia and splendors of his official liveries was even more astonishing than his remarkable denunciation of the pleasures of the table, since to dress as well as play the part of hereditary grandee had been till this minute his constant and enthusiastic ambition.
"A meat-jack, I mean--or a--I know not vat you call it.

Ach, I vant a leetle fun, Alicia." "A little fun," repeated the Baroness in a breathless voice.

"What kind of fun ?" "I know not," said he, turning once more to stare out of the window.
To this dignified representative of a particularly dignified State even the trees of Belgrave Square seemed at that moment a trifle too conventionally perpendicular.

If they would but dance and wave their boughs he would have greeted their greenness more gladly.

A good-looking nursemaid wheeled a perambulator beneath their shade, and though she never looked his way, he took a wicked pleasure in surreptitiously closing first one eye and then the other in her direction.