‘Oh! some confusion at head-quarters. A great tallow-chandler’s son got into the regiment, and committed some heresy at mess.’
‘I do not know the brother,’ said the Duke.
‘You are fortunate, then. He is unendurable. To give you an idea of him, suppose you met him here (which you never will), he would write to you the next day, “My dear St. James.”’
‘My tailor presented me his best compliments, the other morning,’ said the Duke.
‘The world is growing familiar,’ said Mr. Annesley.
‘There must be some remedy,’ said Lord Darrell.
‘Yes!’ said Lord Squib, with indignation. ‘Tradesmen now-a-days console themselves for not getting their bills paid by asking their customers to dinner.’
‘It is shocking,’ said Mr. Annesley, with a forlorn air. ‘Do you know, I never enter society now without taking as many preliminary precautions as if the plague raged in all our chambers. In vain have I hitherto prided myself on my existence being unknown to the million. I never now stand still in a street, lest my portrait be caught for a lithograph; I never venture to a strange dinner, lest I should stumble upon a fashionable novelist; and even with all this vigilance, and all this denial, I have an intimate friend whom I cannot cut, and who, they say, writes for the Court Journal.’
‘But why cannot you cut him?’ asked Lord Darrell.
‘He is my brother; and, you know, I pride myself upon my domestic feelings.’