“An inopportune moment,” cried the ardent gentleman. “You come at the most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?”
“I do not,” answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of laughter came from the inner room.
“Basil,” said Lord Beaumont solemnly, “I have Wimpole here.”
“And who is Wimpole?”
“Basil,” cried the other, “you must have been in the country. You must have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?”
“As to who Shakespeare was,” answered my friend placidly, “my views go no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is—” and his speech also was cloven with a roar of laughter from within.
“Wimpole!” cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. “Haven't you heard of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation, I do not say into an art—for that, perhaps, it always was but into a great art, like the statuary of Michael Angelo—an art of masterpieces. His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot dead. They are final; they are—”
Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of the inner house into the hall where we were standing.
“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.
“I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it,” exploded the large old gentleman. “I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like that. I won't be made a guy. I won't—”