“She had bare feet in loose sandals—feet you would have given ten years of your life to be walked upon by,” continued Massey rapidly, “with anklets that jingled as she went up. Old brown Windsor hustled her off as I came in—I’m afraid he must be her husband; and yet—I don’t know. Wonder if one could get lodgings in that house; it’s let out in floors, I know.”
“Not to us; they’d know what we were up to,” said Dicky gloomily. “I believe both of those beggars suspect us already. They’re only waiting for us to have spent our last half-crown on narghilis that we can’t smoke and cotton-wool beetles, and then they’ll politely bow us out and snigger to themselves over our greenness. We’ve been making fools of ourselves, Massey; I shouldn’t wonder if she was a decoy, a made-up old thing, very likely, the mother of old brown Windsor, henna’d and dyed and veiled till she looked beautiful at a distance, but a regular mummy at less than twelve paces.”
“What, would ye slander beauty herself? Is nothing sacred to you? Look here, I’ve got an idea. You know how jolly quick Mr. George Lauriston shuts us both up if we venture to have an opinion of our own about anything—female beauty for instance?”
“He has been putting on a little too much side lately, certainly.”
“I tell you that young man wants taking down. You know how he sneered the other night at mess when we said we’d discovered a new beauty?”
“Yes, he did. Well?”
“Well, we’ll make him see her and judge for himself and satisfy our curiosity at the same time.”
“What are you up to now?”
“I tell Mr. George Lauriston my brother has taken rooms at 36, Mary Street; I ask him to call. I tell him to go straight in, upstairs to the first floor, and that the first door is my brother’s. He won’t find him naturally, because he will not be there; so he’ll inevitably see the lady, and we’ll pump him afterwards, as to what she looked like, what she said, how she spoke.”
“Massey, you’re off your head. There’d be a deuce of a row. Scheherazade would scream, brown Windsor would draw his scimitar, there’d be a scrimmage on the stairs, and what would happen to you and me when Lauriston got back would be better imagined than described.”