“That? He’s a most important officer. That is Morden. He is managing director of the Antibilious Pill Company. I have heard that his workers sometimes turn out a myriad myriad pills a day in the twenty-four hours. Fancy a myriad myriad!”
“A myriad myriad. No wonder he looks proud,” said Graham. “Pills! What a wonderful time it is! That man in purple?”
“He is not quite one of the inner circle, you know. But we like him. He is really clever and very amusing. He is one of the heads of the Medical Faculty of our London University. All medical men, you know, are shareholders in the Medical Faculty Company, and wear that purple. You have to be—to be qualified. But of course, people who are paid by fees for doing something—” She smiled away the social pretensions of all such people.
“Are any of your great artists or authors here?”
“No authors. They are mostly such queer people—and so preoccupied about themselves. And they quarrel so dreadfully! They will fight, some of them, for precedence on staircases! Dreadful isn’t it? But I think Wraysbury, the fashionable capillotomist, is here. From Capri.”
“Capillotomist,” said Graham. “Ah! I remember. An artist! Why not?”
“We have to cultivate him,” she said apologetically. “Our heads are in his hands.” She smiled.
Graham hesitated at the invited compliment, but his glance was expressive. “Have the arts grown with the rest of civilised things?” he said. “Who are your great painters?”
She looked at him doubtfully. Then laughed. “For a moment,” she said, “I thought you meant—” She laughed again. “You mean, of course, those good men you used to think so much of because they could cover great spaces of canvas with oil-colours? Great oblongs. And people used to put the things in gilt frames and hang them up in rows in their square rooms. We haven’t any. People grew tired of that sort of thing.”
“But what did you think I meant?”