As he read it, he clutched wildly at his long black mustaches for support.
“‘Dear old Verb,’ the Hon. Bertie had written, ‘I think you will be too much of a good fellow to hold me to my rash words of last night.
“‘The mater and I talked it over at my bedside while the plastercasts were being fashioned.
“‘Though the tears blot this letter yet through their splashes, I cannot but see that mamma’s advice is good. Better, the mater says, a broken heart than a succession of fractured ribs!
“‘And myself looking into the future I cannot bear to think of my children beholding a father who is nothing but a cracked and shattered pulp.
“‘Mother begs you to be generous and says she is more than willing to be generous in her turn, desiring me to say she will be most glad amply to finance your contemplated trip into the desert. And even beyond.
“‘I hope, dear, we may ever remain pals. After all it will be nicer when we meet—will it not—just to shake hands?
“‘Brokenly,
“‘Bertie.’”
“O, but I say, you know,” said Lord Tawdry, “this could be patched up.”
“Only Bertie.”
“Rot. You could hold him.”
“Not if he saw me coming. The boy is the best sprinter at Oxford. Anyway——”
Verbeena regarded her brother through the sweeping black lashes of her impenetrably palpable orbs, considering carefully that the fulminations between them had reached a clangorous climax of the neurotically nepotic.
This was, indeed, the sort of look she gave him and she was a long while at it.
He tried to stare back at her with the intolerability of the inhumanly inoculated. But he found it fundamentally difficult and dropped his eye-glass fifty-four times in the course of the construction of this cryptic attitude.
Verbeena laughed. She would put the skids under him. It was time—high time. Had he not already set his face, such as it was, against the aspirations of her innermost urge? Hadn’t he, because of ignorance of the illuminative interior expansiveness of her reason for desiring to hit forth into the Sahara sided with Old Hen Speedway and that whole crew of clacking character assassins and killjoys?