Tessy was never very well nowadays; she was a slight and fragile little thing and Susan had been a violent and aggressive child long before she was born. In the long-lost days before the war when Bobby had seen Tessy first she had been the lightest, daintiest, most perfect thing imaginable; he had compared her to a white petal drifting down through sunlight, and almost written a poem about her; he had loved her tremendously. But it had seemed to him impossible to make love to so exquisite a being, and Billy Malmesbury, who was less scrupulous, had slipped in front of him and married her; she had not appreciated the delicacy of not making love to her. And then came the war and wounds and here they all were again, fagged and near the thirties, in a world where their small annuities brought them far less than they had promised to do. Billy was the junior partner of an architect and much encumbered with drawing-boards. He was a large-framed young man with a big, round, good-looking, slightly astonished face, pleasantly dappled with freckles. He had a great protective affection for Bobby. He sat now and designed a new sort of labour-saving pantry and, with a sense of infinite protection, let Bobby get the meal.
“And now I can tell you,” said Bobby, when at last all three of them were sitting at table.
“It’s a little dear of a lunatic,” he said. “If it’s a lunatic at all.”
“I hope it isn’t,” said Tessy.
“He’s quite tidy in his person and he hangs together—mentally he hangs together—and his eyes aren’t in the least wild. A leetle too bright and open perhaps. But he does think the world belongs to him.”
“Well, Susan does that,” said Billy.
“And so does Billy,” said Tessy.
“But not quite with the same air of magnificent responsibility. You see he thinks he’s a certain Mesopotamian monarch called Sargon—I’ve heard of him because we had a little dust-up with the Turks round and about his stamping ground—he thinks he’s this Sargon come again and come somehow—that bit’s a little difficult—into the empire of the whole earth. It was Sargon, you know, who started all these British Lions and Imperial Eagles in the world. And so he proposes to take possession of the planet, which is in such a frightful mess——”
“Hear, hear!” said Billy.
“And put it in order.”