“She probably feels the void?”
“Sir?”
“Figures the hot sands of the desert may warm her up a bit.”
“Frapjous! And yet you see, she goes alone! What in the world her idea is I’m sure I—look—there’s young Butternut after her now! A good lad but not, I think, quite clear above. Really you know he can’t be. For surely must he know that all Verbeena inherited from her father was the pistol Sir John shot himself with. Although, of course, she shares with her brother, Tawdry, the same damned haughty luck at bridge. These two things and a sterling uppercut is all she owns and yet he would marry her!”
“You’d think he’d have a Butternut,” said the American shamelessly, although, after due explanation, the Englishman broke into hilarious laughter.
“You mean, he hadn’t best? I quite agree with you.”
They stood with looks of mild intelligence on their cosmopolitanly caustic countenances at Lord Tawdry and his sister, Verbeena, as they sat predominantly on the platform of the ballroom acting as host and hostess with tremendous haute monde de flair.
Lord Tawdry was six feet two in height, though seated, and half a foot wide and he wore an eight-pound black mustache to show that regardless of Verbeena’s curiously trained character, there was nothing ambisextrous about himself.
His courtesy was so inbred that he kept looking the company over as if he wished they’d all go home and let him go to bed. His sleek head would drop forward sleepily from time to time but always bob up like the balloon it possibly perhaps was maybe.
The distinguished nobleman was, moreover, an awful tramp at wearing a monocle. It was dropping out of his eye every few minutes keeping six servants busy catching it and putting it back. Frequently they took a mean advantage and slapped it back.