“Not a bit. It’s perfectly proper swank. In fact, I don’t want you and Dennis to appear till the special has arrived and everyone is in the ballroom. The Royals will be on their dais at the end of the room, and the rest shall be marshalled round the walls, and you and Dennis and I will march up the whole length of the room. And then we go straight into the Royal Quadrille. I’ve told them.”
“Very well,” said she. “But what about you? I don’t even know who you’re to be yet. You’ve always represented old Colin, at fancy-dress here, but you can’t if Dennis does.”
He laughed.
“Admirably reasoned,” he said. “Too many Colins would spoil the broth, like too many Queens. But I’m going to complete the group just a little way behind Dennis. Merely Mephistopheles: but he had something to do with it. Strictly Elizabethan too, though belonging to other ages as well.”
“Oh, Colin, that’s rather grim,” she said. “Why produce the family skeleton?”
“Well, it’s the skeleton on which the family has grown fat. Of course everybody thinks the legend is mediæval bunkum, but they’ll play up. Dennis will be an adorable Colin: I made him try his things on just now, and if the real one looked as enchanting as he I don’t wonder the Queen lost her aged heart. And as you’ve lost yours to Dennis, we shall have a real parallel. As for you, darling, you’ll be an anachronism but that can’t be helped. Elizabeth was an ugly old woman at the Colin epoch, and we can’t call you that exactly.”
She was silent a moment.
“I wonder if you’ll be vexed at what I want to say,” she said.
“How can I tell?” he said. “I don’t suppose I shall care much.”
“It’s this then. Please don’t get yourself up like Mephistopheles. It’s for Dennis’s sake I ask it. I want him to be among those who think the legend—what did you call it?—mediæval bunkum. Colin, do leave him to think that.”