Loftus was also lighting a cigar. "Then I too am a spook," he replied. "I foretold that you would say something ghastly."
"But, my dear fellow," Orr rejoined, "truth is always that. People fancy that it is made of lace and pearls like a girl on her wedding day. It is not that at all. It is just what you call it. It is ghastly. Read history. Any reliable work is but a succession of groans. The more reliable it is the more groans there will be."
Annandale, who had been helping himself to brandy, interrupted. "Talking of reading things, I saw somewhere that after some dinner or other, when the women had gone, a chap began on a rather—well, don't you know, a sort of barnyard story and the host, who could not quite stomach it, said: 'Suppose we continue the conversation in the drawing-room?' So, Royal, what do you say? If Orr is going to shock us, suppose we do."
Loftus with a painted finger-tip flipped the ashes from his cigar.
"I fear that I have lost the ability to be shocked, but not the ability to be bored."
Yet presently, after another cigar and conscious perhaps that Fanny Price, though often exasperating, never bored, he returned with his guests to the drawing-room.
CHAPTER II
THE POCKET VENUS
HOW do you like my hat?" said Fanny to Sylvia. Since the dinner a week had gone. The two girls were in Irving Place.