Townsend shrugged his shoulders.
“We shall, if he can make another effective entrance,” he said a little bitterly.
Maurice Avery and Wedderburn arrived together. The combination of having just been elected to the Grid and the birth of the new paper had given Maurice such an effervescence of good spirits as even he seldom boasted. Wedderburn in contrast seemed graver, supplying in company with Maurice a solidity to the pair of them that was undeniably beneficial to their joint impression. They were followed almost immediately by Guy Hazlewood, who with his long legs came sloping in as self-possessed as he always was. Perhaps his left eyelid drooped a little lower than it was accustomed, and perhaps the sidelong smile that gave him a superficial resemblance to Michael was drawn down to a sharper point of mockery, but whatever stored-up flashes of mood and fancy Guy had to deliver, he always drawled them out in the same half-tired voice emphasized by the same careless indolence of gesture. And so this evening he was the same Guy Hazlewood, sure of being with his clear-cut pallor and effortless distinction of bearing, the personality that everyone would first observe in whatever company he found himself.
“Nigel not here, of course,” he drawled. “Let’s have a sweep on what he’s been doing. Five bob all round. I say he’s just discovered Milton to be a great poet and is now, reading Lycidas to a spellbound group of the very heartiest Trindogs in Trinity.”
“I think he saw The Perfect Flapper,” said Maurice “and has been trying ever since to find out whether she were a don’s daughter or a theatrical bird of passage.”
“I think he’s forgotten all about it,” pronounced Wedderburn very deeply indeed.
“I hope he saw that ass Bill Mowbray tearing off in the opposite direction and went to fetch him back,” said Townsend.
“I think he’s saying Vespers for the week before last,” Michael proposed as his solution.
Stewart himself came in at that moment, and in answer to an united demand to know the reason of his lateness embraced in that gentle and confiding air of his all the company, included them all as it were in an intimate aside, and with the voice and demeanor of a strayed archangel explained that the fearful velocity of a pill was responsible for his unpunctuality.
“But you’re quite all right now, Nigel?” inquired Guy. “You could almost send a testimonial?”