When I say that, compared with the butler, Respectability itself seems raffish, you will understand. He is a monument, massive, meaningless, and about as useful as a fan in a cyclone. Yet the household revolves about him. He came in, I fancy, with the spittoon….
And now I will show you that the cassock of the confessor has indeed fallen upon you.
Listen. I have been disdained—given the cold shoulder. Such a beautiful shoulder, Toby. Such a shoulder as Artemis presented to Actaeon. But there was good reason for that. It fell on this wise. I sat in a garden and mufti and looked at an aged doorway, thinking how fair a frame it would make. And when next I looked, lo! there was the picture, all warm and smiling, her little white hands about her dark, dark hair. I was overwhelmed. I would have slain dragons, levelled castles, broken the backs of knights for her sake. But before I was given the chance, I was given the shoulder. Now mark how a malicious Fate maketh a mock of me. But three days later I run full tilt into my lady, I, the same Anthony Lyveden—but with my livery on. In case that should not be enough, I presently return to the inn, to learn that I have missed her by forty-eight hours. Veux-tu m'en croire?
Beneath the unfair strain my poor vocabulary broke down. Indeed, I soon had no alternative but to repeat myself, thus violating what I know to be one of your most sacred rules.
Assez, j'en finis.
You are so distant and it will be so long before this letter reaches you, that it requires an effort steadily to regard you as a confidant. Already that impression of you is fainter than it was when I picked up my pen. A reply from you, Toby, would do much to revive it—would, in fact, turn into substance the shadow with which I am, rather desperately, cheating my common-sense.
A toi, mon beau, ANTHONY LYVEDEN.
Having addressed this letter to Australia, Lyveden made the best of an enamelled basin and a mirror, which was not quite so good as one which, once upon a time, his servant had purchased in Port Said for five piastres. Then he put on his very expensive plum-coloured coat and descended twelve flights of stairs.
Five minutes later he opened the front door, confessed to an irreverent gentleman in blue and yellow that "Ole Flat-Feet" was at home, and, after conducting them to the first floor, ushered "The Honourable Mrs. George Wrangle, Miss Wrangle, Miss Sarah Wrangle" into the presence itself. With a contempt for tradition, the Marchioness not only extended to each of the ladies her large right hand, but withheld no one of its fingers.
The identity of the guests was then communicated to the butler, whose supervision of the service of tea depended upon the visitor's position in the table of precedence. That of Mrs. Wrangle, apparently, fell dismally short of the standard which the great man imposed, for, upon hearing her name, he stared indignantly upon a cat which was cleaning itself upon the hearth of his parlour, and then resumed the perusal of the Morning Advertiser in contemptuous silence.