“And apparently got one—or more.”
“Apparently so, Sir John.”
“Moreover—”
Lady Cantourne turned on him with her usual vivacity.
“Moreover?” she repeated.
“He did not need to write it down on the card; it was written there already.”
She closed her fan with a faint smile
“I sometimes wonder,” she said, “whether, in our young days, you were so preternaturally observant as you are now.”
“No,” he answered, “I was not. I affected scales of the very opaquest description, like the rest of my kind.”
In the meantime this man's son was going about his business with a leisurely savoir-faire which few could rival. Jack Meredith was the beau-ideal of the society man in the best acceptation of the word. One met him wherever the best people congregated, and he invariably seemed to know what to do and how to do it better than his compeers. If it was dancing in the season, Jack Meredith danced, and no man rivalled him. If it was grouse shooting, Jack Meredith held his gun as straight as any man. All the polite accomplishments in their season seemed to come to him without effort; but there was in all the same lack of heart—that utter want of enthusiasm which imparted to his presence a subtle suggestion of boredom. The truth was that he was over-educated. Sir John had taught him how to live and move and have his being with so minute a care, so keen an insight, that existence seemed to be nothing but an habitual observance of set rules.