Agnes laughed.
“Ah, I believe you know him all the time,” she said, “and mean to repeat to him all the nice things that we say about him. You know him intimately, I believe, but if you tell me that he has already sent you those three sonnets he wrote as he flew to Cologne the other day, which he promised to read us to-night, I don’t think I could bear it. Mr. Goodenough and I were promised the first hearing of them, and I believe he has sent them to you already.”
“Indeed he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Withers in a social agony. “I really don’t know Mr. Oriole, though I am dying to. I hoped you would have brought him to my little party last Thursday.”
“Thursday, Thursday,” said Agnes. “Yes, I remember: Robbie was up in the Lakes. Such a pity! He would have loved it, just the sort of party he adores.”
Mrs. Withers’s brow, that Greek brow with a fillet of crimson velvet across it, from which depended a splendid pearl, grew slightly corrugated, and made the pearl tremble. She prided herself on knowing all her engagements for a week ahead, but the recollection of them was difficult even to her.
“Sunday at lunch then,” she said. “Will you both come and bring Mr. Oriole? Tell him how divine it would be if he would read us the Cologne sonnets.”
“I’ll tell Robbie,” said Agnes, “but as for your chance of finding him disengaged, I couldn’t promise anything. How his friends grab him when he appears! Ah, there’s John—I mean Lord Marrible. Well?”
“He simply isn’t here.”
Agnes turned to me.
“Ah, now I remember,” she said. “He told me that if he couldn’t get here by half-past ten, he wouldn’t come at all, but would just send the car for us. What time is it now?”