“Well, I suppose, since her blood is very blue and mine merely tinged, she was rather gracious, but of course the really ‘blue’ people generally are.”
“Tell me who you happen to be?” Lorraine leant back against her cushions, with her slow, easy grace, asking the question with a lightness that robbed it of all pointedness or snobbery.
He seemed amused, for he smiled as he answered frankly:
“I happen to be Alymer Hadstock Hermon, one fo the Hermons all right, but not the drawing-room end, so to speak; at the same time tinged with her family shadiness—‘blue’ of course I mean—though no doubt it applies in other ways as well. Does that satisfy your curiosity, or do you want to know more?”
She loved looking at him, particularly with that humorous little smile on his lips, so she said:
“Not half. I want to know all the rest.”
“Very well. It’s quite an open book. I was born twenty-four years ago. I am an only child, and, as usual, the apple of my mother’s eye and the terror of my father’s pocket. He, my father, is not much else just now except a recluse. He was recently a member of parliament, a Liberal member, and, God knows, that’s little enough. I believe he even climbed in by a Chinese pigtail.
“My grandfather was a Judge in the Divorce Court, which doesn’t somehow sound quite respectable, and my great-grandfather was a writer of law books, for which, personally, I think he ought to have been hanged. I can’t go any farther back; at any rate I don’t want to, because I’m certain it’s all so correct and dull there isn’t even a family skeleton.”
“Is it the women or the men of the family that are beautiful?”
“Oh, both,” with humorous eagerness. “Skeletons and ghosts we sought, and clamoured for, but ugliness, never.”