NOBLE LORDS
SIR,—I share Mr. Gere's amusement. He accuses me of falling into a pit—and then drives into one himself, crank-Case over sparking-plug. No one will deny his facts and figures—but he uses them to dispute an argument entirely of his own invention. A lady in her own right, he tells us, married to a peer by courtesy, may use her own courtesy title if she pleases. No doubt she may—but whoever said that Miss Steen's " Lady Perdita " was a lady in her own right? Not I, nor Miss Steen ; and since I do not believe so good a novelist would bother to make such an insignificant point, without explanation, and in a minute character, I am driven to suppose that she has made a mistake—especially as she uses both styles. And who " implied " that the eldest son of a duke was inevitably a marquess? Not I ; I merely suggested that he was not usually a viscount. Nor is he, as Mr. Gere obligingly demonstrates.
I was not reviewing Debrett but a portrait of society, and I shall continue to think it a bogus-sounding world where (among other things) the pattern gentleman insists on the use of " perfume " and the duke's daughter-in-law is Lady Cassiobury one day and Lady Perdita another.
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