Lord Peter drew a writing pad towards him.
“What are you going to write?” asked Parker, looking over his shoulder with some amusement.
Lord Peter wrote:
“Isn’t civilisation wonderful?”
He signed this simple message and slipped it into an envelope.
“If you want to be immune from silly letters, Charles,” he said, “don’t carry your monomark in your hat.”
“And what do you propose to do next?” asked Parker. “Not, I hope, to send me round to Monomark House to get the name of a client. I couldn’t do that without official authority, and they would probably kick up an awful shindy.”
“No,” replied his friend, “I don’t propose violating the secrets of the confessional. Not in that quarter at any rate. I think, if you can spare a moment from your mysterious correspondent, who probably does not intend to be found, I will ask you to come and pay a visit to a friend of mine. It won’t take long. I think you’ll be interested. I—in fact, you’ll be the first person I’ve ever taken to see her. She will be very much touched and pleased.”
He laughed a little self-consciously.
“Oh,” said Parker, embarrassed. Although the men were great friends, Wimsey had always preserved a reticence about his personal affairs—not so much by concealing as by ignoring them. This revelation seemed to mark a new stage of intimacy, and Parker was not sure that he liked it. He conducted his own life with an earnest middle-class morality which he owed to his birth and up-bringing, and, while theoretically recognising that Lord Peter’s world acknowledged different standards, he had never contemplated being personally faced with any result of their application in practice.