And he reached happily for his Theocritus.
Thus, regardless of his doom, the little victim played.
Chapter I.
The Nesbitt Combination
On a certain soft evening in early April, Guy Nesbitt of Dell Cottage, Duffley, Oxfordshire, was engaged in wrestling with his dress-tie.
Dress-ties did not take kindly to Guy. When a dress-tie found itself encircling a collar belonging to Guy a devil entered into it. All dress-ties were like this with Guy. They knew he had met his master, and they became as wax in his hands. They melted, they drooped, they languished, they slid, and the means they employed to prevent the ends of their bows from ever coming even were a manifestation of the triumph of matter over mind. A South African negro, seeing a dress-tie pursuing its eel-like antics in Guy’s impotent hands would have had no hesitation in falling down on his knees and worshipping it on the spot, and quite rightly; one of Guy’s dress-ties could have given pounds to any of the ju-ju’s of his native land and disposed of him in half a round.
Giving up the unequal struggle, Guy dashed the victorious excrescence to the floor, where it lay chortling gently, whipped another out of the open drawer in front of him and strode to the door which separated his dressing-room from his wife’s bedroom, muttering naughtily to himself as he went. At the risk of becoming tedious, he must try to give some idea of his appearance during the second-and-a-half occupied by his journey.
Guy Nesbitt was a thin, tall man, almost an attenuated tall man, and he carried himself just about as badly as a man can. His rather narrow shoulders were invariably bowed like those of Atlas, and between them his small, half-bald head shot forward at such an angle that, although he was nearly always taller than his interlocutor, he gave the impression of peering up at anybody he happened to be addressing over his rimless pince-nez. In spite of the ribald observations of one of his wife’s friends, Guy was not old; a mere thirty-one. But he had looked exactly as he did now (which was forty-five) for the last five years, and would probably continue to do so for the next twenty. The other part of the candid friend’s remark was not inapt; he did look exactly like a vulture, but a thoroughly benign and good-tempered old vulture at that. Guy had never lost his temper in his life, a matter which had caused his parents (he was an only son) considerable satisfaction —for parents are notoriously short-sighted folk—and his old nurse an equal perturbation.
For the rest he was delicate, but refused to admit it; possessed of a private income with which he was generous beyond reason or logic; not so much of a recluse as might have been expected, considering the scholarly nature of his chief hobby, which was the minor poets of the seventeenth century; and he wielded a nifty brassie and a surprisingly ferocious tennis-racket. His manner was as much of a contradiction as most of his other attributes; at times he was as prim and precise as the maiden aunt of a Dean, at others he verged on the Rabelaisian. He had a pretty wit, and he could make up his mind quickly.
“Blessed were the Picts and Scots, Cynthia,” he observed wistfully, closing the door meticulously behind him. “They may have had trouble at times with their sporrans, perhaps, but what is a mere sporran?”
Cynthia, seated in a kimono before her dressing-table, smiled at him over her shoulder; she had a particularly sweet smile. She was a tall, graceful girl of twenty-three, who bore every promise of turning later into that most delightful of creatures, a charmingly gracious woman. Gracious women are of two widely opposite kinds, one the most adorable and one the most fell of their sex, and it is the presence or absence of charm which makes or mars them. There was no fear of Cynthia falling into the latter category.