Mr. Despencer added his testimony that it was very like the Marquis of Severn’s place in Worcestershire—indeed it was, for there were grass and laurel-bushes in both.
The visitors tore themselves away at last, and disappeared, a vision of varnished panels and gleaming harness and tossing horses’ heads and flying dust. And what did Alderman Dobbin do when they were gone?
He did what every other well-conducted alderman in his situation would have done. He went forth into the town and bought a peerage.
Then he shut himself up in his counting-house, and sat down to write a letter.
SCENE VI
WHAT PEOPLE SAID
“Mr. Hammond!”
Thus proclaimed the machine stationed outside the door of the principal drawing-room in Berkeley Square. It was the night of the marchioness’s concert, and a stream of splendidly clad dames, rustling in silk and velvet, and flashing in pearls and diamonds, and of meanly clad men, disguised as waiters, except for an occasional red or blue ribbon, slightly suggestive of that worn by a pet cat, was flowing up the stairs, and through the doorway, where the machine checked them off one by one like an automatic turnstile. And the proclamations were by no means a mere empty ceremony, for without them the marchioness would have been quite ignorant of the names of at least half of those with whom she was shaking hands on the other side of the threshold.
The hygienic regulations by which every Board-School child is entitled to a fixed number of cubic feet of space do not apply to the guests of marchionesses, and it was becoming difficult to move through the concert-room without inflicting physical injury on others. The wiser of the late arrivals, or those more familiar with the locality, backed out as soon as they had mumbled the necessary formula of greeting to their hostess, and took refuge in a smaller drawing-room, where the Lady Victoria was holding a levee of her own particular friends. It was to this room that Hammond made his way after bowing over the marchioness’s hand.
Directly he lifted the curtain which screened the open doorway, Lady Victoria, clad in white, with a string of turquoise forget-me-nots round her bared neck, deserted a group of half a dozen other admirers, and came towards him with a frankness which would have jarred harshly on her mother’s notions of finesse.
“That is right, Mr. Hammond. I am so glad you have come into this room. It is cool, it is comfortable, and, what is better, you can’t hear a note of the music.”