“Very well, Master Paster.” Mrs. Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.
“But tell me,” Mr. Mercaptan went on, “if it isn’t indiscreet—what does your friend look like?”
“W—well,” Rosie answered, “he’s fair, and though he’s quite young he wears a beard.” With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto’s broad blond fan.
“A beard! But, good heavens,” Mr. Mercaptan slapped his thigh, “it’s Coleman, it’s obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!”
“Well, whoever it was,” said Rosie severely, “he played a very stupid sort of joke.”
“For which I thank him. De tout mon cœur.”
Rosie smiled and looked sideways. “All the same,” she said, “I shall give him a piece of my mind.”
Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr. Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless glaze certainly did look a bit comical.
After tea Mr. Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room. They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of Du Côté de chez Swann, the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr. Mercaptan’s. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr. Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the “Droit du Seigneur,” it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his Hibbert Journal, his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.
“Bravo!” she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake’s leather tucked up under her. “Bravo!” she cried as Mr. Mercaptan finished his reading and looked up for his applause.