“Have you changed it?”
“Dear old man, you didn’t commit the horrible error of asking our parlour-maid for Mr David Rothenburg?”
“Yes, I did. Sorry. I believe Deb warned me, but I forgot. Does it matter?”
“She may give notice to-morrow ... we live uncomfortably on a tight-rope nowadays, and some of us haven’t learnt how to walk it yet. Poor mother, for instance—she’s always side-slipping. Rhoda is fairly new, and father deludes himself that she doesn’t know our guilty secret. I say, you remember Miss Swinley?” The mischievous school-boy was uppermost in David now—“and how proud she was of being descended from the Hereford Swinleys? Well, now it’s got round to her how someone said publicly that of course she’s really a German and everybody knows her real name is Schweinthal!”
Richard threw back his head and filled the room with his guffaws.
“Schweinthal—Swine-valley ... Swinley! Oh, that’s top-hole! She was always so jolly full of swank and backbone. But all the same, Redbury, I’m all at sea with these swarms of English county people that have magically cropped up in our set during the last few weeks. No offence meant to you, but who the deuce are the Lanes and the Silvertons and the Mounts and the Gordons and the Meadowes?”
“All old familiar faces really. And I can tell you who the Mounts and the Meadowes are, anyhow ... they’re each one-half of my cousins, the Wiesenbergs. The elder and younger branch of the family have long been at daggers drawn, and they’ve hailed the opportunity to split into two. And the Mounts know nothing of the Meadowes, nor shall the Meadowes ever go to meet the Mounts. My other cousin, whose father changed his name about forty years ago, swears that he’ll change it back again from Holmes to Hohenheim by way of protest to all the funk and flurry.”
“Quite a pleasing moment at our boarding-house last week, when two Scandinavian ladies were introduced to each other and neither knew the language.”
“But both broke into floods of delighted German? That’s what happens these days when Swede meets Swede.”