He was a great buyer of pictures, which, perhaps, he did not understand, and a great collector of books which certainly he never read.

All the world respected him, and he was a man to whom the respect of all the world was as the breath of his nostrils.
But even he was not without his peacock on the wall, his skeleton in the closet, his thorn in his side; though the peacock did not scream loud, the skeleton was not very terrible in his anatomical arrangement, nor was the thorn likely to fester to a gangrene.

The Duke was always in awe about his wife.
He was ever uneasy about his wife, but it must not be supposed that he feared the machinations of any Burgo Fitzgerald as being destructive of his domestic comfort.

The Duchess was and always had been all that is proper.

Ladies in high rank, when gifted with excelling beauty, have often been made the marks of undeserved calumny;--but no breath of slander had ever touched her name.