‘Well, take my advice and don’t let Joey know.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’d look down on you.’
‘Why? Lady Wyse is a very charming woman.’
‘You say that because you’re a toff. She’d hear a very different name, if she came down our street. I’d tell her straight myself.’
XXIV
It was quite a small party at Lady Wyse’s. Disturnal was there, the rising young High Church M.P.; Sir Peter Parchmin; his wife, and a few miscellaneous ladies; General Wapshot; a Man with a Clever Face; an Eminent Scientist; and a Philosopher. This last was not a speaking character; a little wizened man with a bald head; he had made a reputation in his youth by retiring into solitude for three years and coming back with the apophthegm, ‘Give me a pebble and a protoplasm and I will make you a universe.’ Nobody having given him either, his plans had rested there. They put him in a Chair at Cambridge, and he had never opened his mouth since. He and the Eminent Scientist were men with that peculiar knack the learned have of looking out of place in any clothes they wear, but convincing you somehow that they would look more out of place without them. Lady Wyse had invited them quite at random, because she thought they would be interested in a scientific scheme which Sir Peter was to propound that night; she could not surely be expected to distinguish different sorts of savants?
Lady Parchmin was a tired but talkative blonde, who made one feel sorry for Sir Peter in a kind of abstract way; yet she was a saint, and he was an immoral man. He pretended to pursue Lady Wyse from mean and interested motives; but there he lied. His love for Lady Wyse was the only genuine sentiment he had ever felt—that was why she tolerated him; she was a strong ennobling thought, like Wagner music remembered or imagined in a railway train; his wife, the eternal passenger who sat before him, dim and dowdy, on the other seat, was only a monument of dull duty and a long-forgotten fancy.
Dinner was drawing to a close. Wine and fruit were going round; the butler had marched his squad away.
The Man with the Clever Face suddenly distinguished himself—Lady Wyse had introduced him as ‘the well-known Mr. Holmes,’ but neither Disturnal nor the General nor the Eminent Scientist remembered to have heard of him before. Lady Parchmin had been recounting her emotions on seeing a newspaper placard as she drove to dinner.