“Oh, I say, Aunt Nell,” he said, “don’t let’s miss the day. I’ll explain the whole thing to you in the evening after dinner.”
“You’ll explain it now, if you can.”
She led the way into the library.
“It’s quite simple really,” he said. “Bertram Connell, your nephew, though a poet and all that, is rather an ass.”
“Are you Bertram Connell, or are you not?” said Mrs. MacDermott.
“Oh Lord, no. I’m not that sort of fellow at all. I couldn’t write a line of poetry to save my life. He’s—you simply can’t imagine how frightfully brainy he is. All the same I rather like him. He was my fag at school and we were up together at Cambridge. I’ve more or less kept up with him ever since. He’s more like a girl than a man, you know. I daresay that’s why I liked him. Then he crocked up, nerves and that sort of thing. And they said he must come over here. He didn’t like the notion a bit. I was in London just then on leave, and he told me how he hated the idea.”
“So did I,” said Mrs. MacDermott.
“I said that he was a silly ass and that if I had the chance of a month in the west of Ireland in a sporting sort of house—he told me you hunted a lot—I’d simply jump at it. But the poor fellow was frightfully sick at the prospect, said he was sure he wouldn’t get on with you, and that you’d simply hate him. He had a book of poetry just coming out and he was hoping to get a play of his taken on, a play about fairies. I give you my word he was very near crying, so, after a lot of talking, we hit on the idea of my coming here. He was to lie low in London so that his father wouldn’t find him.”
“You neither of you thought about me, apparently,” said Mrs. MacDermott.
“Oh, yes we did. We thought as you hadn’t seen him since he was a child that you wouldn’t know him. And of course we thought you’d be frightfully old. There didn’t seem to be much harm in it.”