Van Voss protested inaudibly.
“Oh, you are, you know you are,” McDiarmid asserted gaily, “and we’re going to carry you in triumph down the Mall. Get Van Voss to give you one, Lady Hudson, and get Grimshaw here to drive you down to Bushey on a coach labelled ‘Queen of Sheba.’”
“He doesn’t take me anywhere any more,” Etta Hudson said.
And Grimshaw answered desultorily:
“Only give me a chance.”
Etta Hudson sustained, with a brilliant indifference, the glances from the half-closed eyes of McDiarmid and those of the dark, large, rather insolent and inscrutable orbs of the stockbroker.
“Oh yes,” she said to Grimshaw. “You take me down to Bushey again. I’m booked up three deep for the next six months, but I’ll chuck anybody you like except my dressmaker.”
“Booked up?” Robert Grimshaw leant over the rails to say. “Yes, we’re all booked up. We’re an idle, useless crowd, and we never have an instant to do anything that we like.”
McDiarmid, reaching over a long claw, caught hold of the shiny financier, and, hauling him off up the Row, seemed to involve him in a haze of monetary transactions. He was, indeed, supposed at that moment to be selling Van Voss a castle on the Borders, where the King had stayed.
“Well, we used to be chummy enough in the old days,” Etta Hudson said. “Yes, you take me down to Bushey again. Don’t you remember the time we went, and Dudley stopped at home because he thought he was sickening for the measles?”