Lady Sangore was very cold and superior. Her face, which had always borne a close resemblance to that of a horse, became even more superciliously equine. She sat in an even more primly upright attitude than her corsets normally obliged her to maintain, bulging her noble bosom like a pouter pigeon and tilting her nose back as if there were an unpleasant odour under it.
"Yes, you were busy," she said. "You were going to the club, weren't you? Much too busy to attend to business. Ha!" The word "ha" does not do justice to the snort of an irate dragon, but the limited phonetics of the English alphabet will produce nothing better. "You'd better stop being so busy and get your wits about you. Something must be seriously wrong or Mr Luker wouldn't have sent for you like this."
Fairweather twittered. He fidgeted with his hands and shuffled his feet and wriggled; there seemed to be an itch in his muscles that would not let him settle down.
"I don't like it," he moaned. "I don't like it at all. Luker is… Really, I can't understand him at all these days. His behaviour was most peculiar when I told him about the wire I had from Lady Valerie this afternoon. He didn't even sympathize at all with what I went through with that man Templar and that boorish detective. He asked me a few questions and took the wire and rushed off and left me alone in his drawing room, and I just sat there until he sent the butler to tell me to go away and wait till I heard from him."
"I can't think why men get so excited about that girl," said Lady Sangore disparagingly, stabbing her husband, with a basilisk eye.
The general cleared his throat.
"Really, Gwendolyn! You surely don't suspect—"
"I suspect nothing," said Lady Sangore freezingly. "I merely keep my eyes open. I know what men are."
She seemed to have made a unique anthropological discovery.
Fairweather leaned forward, glancing around him furtively as if he feared being overheard.