Kingsmead, who had come in without knocking, sat down and stretched his thin legs over the arm of the chair. "Ratting."
"Oh, you nasty child! What a beastly thing!"
"Ratting, my dear mother, is a fine, manly, old-time sport. Most fellows of my age and appearance would be making love to their mothers' friends, but I bar women. Sport," he added solemnly, "for Thomas Edward, Earl of Kingsmead."
Carron, who had always disliked the boy, looked at him. "So you bar women? Many other 'men of your appearance' have said the same."
It was a nasty thrust, but Tommy, though he felt it, grinned cheerfully.
"Stung!" he cried, laying his hand on his heart in an absurd theatrical gesture. "Your bolt has gone home, my dear fellow. But experience may take the place of beauty at fifty."
Carron started. He loathed being fifty, he loathed Tommy, he loathed everything.
Tommy turned to the kitten and talked artless nonsense to it to fill up the pause that followed, and Lady Kingsmead powdered her nose with a bit of chamois skin that lived in a silver box full of Fuller's earth under the chaise-longue pillows.
"Glad Brigit's coming?" asked Tommy, turning with appalling suddenness to Carron, whose hatred for him increased tenfold as he tried to answer carelessly.
As he replied, Brigit came in, without a hat, but covered from head to foot with a rough tweed coat. Her wavy hair was very wet, and her gloves, as she pulled them off, dripped on the floor. In her pearly pale cheeks was a lovely pink tinge.