“By God, Hobhouse, there’s a woman in that sack!”
CHAPTER II
“MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW.”
At Lady Jersey’s town house, in Portman Square, the final course had been served and the gentlemen’s glasses were being replenished. Lady Jersey gave the signal. The gentlemen rose and bowed, the three ladies withdrew to the drawing-room; then the host, the earl, said, cracking a walnut:
“I heard the other day that George Gordon is on his way back to London. You were with him in the East some time, weren’t you, Hobhouse?”
There were but three besides the host: Sheridan, the playwright, looking the beau and wit combined, of a clarety, elderly, red complexion, brisk and bulbous—William Lamb, heir of the Melbourne title, a personified “career” whose voice was worn on the edges by public speaking—and Hobhouse, whom the earl addressed.
The young man bowed. “I left him in Greece just a year ago.”
“Is it true,” asked Lamb, sipping his Moët with finical deliberation, “that he drinks nothing but barley-water and dines on two soda biscuits?”
“He eats very little,” assented Hobhouse; “dry toast, water-cress, a glass of claret—that was usually his regimen.”
“What an infernal pose!” Lamb exclaimed, rousing. “A ghoul eating rice with a needle! He does it to be eccentric. Why, at Cambridge they say he used to keep a tame bear! His appetite is all apiece with his other fopperies abroad that the papers reprint here. One week he’s mopish. Another, he’s for being jocular with everybody. Then again he’s a sort of limping Don Quixote, rowing with the police for a woman of the town—like that Greek demirep of his he rescued from the sack, that Petersham tells about.”
“Nobody believes Petersham’s yarns!” growled Sheridan.