Lord Eastonville, who owns the rooms, is a thorough gentleman of the well-bred English type, with brains enough to carry him safely through life—good-looking, generous, easy-going to a fault, and twenty-five. Too fond, it may be, of taking his ease, as all well-to-do Englishmen are now-a-days, but a man who could fight for his country, as in the old Crimean times, when war galvanised our lethargy into life. War is no unmixed evil; it carries with it a blessing in disguise. It is the scare and shadow of war that is the curse without the blessing.
Thorne, as a minute in his company would prove to you, is a hard-headed journalist; witty, and an excellent talker; facile, of course, with his pen, and ready to turn out a new theology as easily as he could write an article on the last discovered butterfly or grub.
Andrews is a graduate of London University, spending with Eastonville the remnant of a holiday. Fairly humorous and incorrigibly deaf—never more so (his friends say) than when a subject bores him—he is himself a trifle of a bore to-night. In his latest translation of Vergil “ploughed with a team” has become in the hands of the printers “ploughed with steam,” an anachronism that pleases him mightily.
He is also sorely exercised over the term “Prolegomena,” used in connexion with our classical editions. “Either the word’s bad Greek,” he says, “or else it’s rank nonsense. ‘Things that are being said before’ means just nothing at all. What they want is a Perfect, ‘things that have been said beforehand,’ which is not only more grammatical, but also (he adds with a chuckle) much more descriptive of prefaces in general.”
“Well, I don’t understand Greek and Latin,” said Thorne, “so suppose we talk English. I have been studying you carefully, Bindo, and have come to the conclusion that you look highly picturesque among all that fruit and flowers. I wonder what made you so good looking; was your father particularly lovely?”
“Neither my father nor my mother, Thorne, though she has contrived to marry again; and the consequence is I’m not so well looked after as I ought to have been, else I shouldn’t be here to-night. Fate, I think, must have made a judicious blend of the best points in his face with the best features of hers. And the result is me.”
“First class grammar, Bindo. She must have sent you to a good school at any rate.”
“Anything else to ask, old man? You seem to be in an inquisitive mood to-night.”
“Yes; who taught you to sing?”
“Le bon Dieu, I suppose, as Patti said. I had only the training of a country choir boy. By the by, my master’s name was Thorne, a matter full of interest to you. I believe I sang by intuition.”