Jollypot’s face fell.
But Dick and Hugh, at any rate, yelling at each other across the intervening forms of Concha and Rory, were in perfect harmony. “I say, Dick, do you remember old Bright, the butler at your father’s? And how angry he used to be when we asked him if he was any relation of John Bright?”
“Yes, rather; and do you remember how he used to say, ‘Port, claret, sherry, madeira, sir?’ always in that order.”
“Yes, and how he used to puff it down one’s neck? And the severe way your mother used to say, ‘Neither, thank you, Bright’!”
Then, from the other end, they would catch sight of the Doña glaring at them indignantly through her lorgnette, and Dick would turn hurriedly to Lady Cust.
As to Teresa, she was indulging in that form of intoxication that has been described before—that of æsthetically withdrawing herself from a large, chattering company. Once when she was doing it David had guessed, and had whispered to her, “The laird’s been deed these twa hoors, but I wisna for spoiling guid company,” in reference to a host who had inconspicuously died, sitting bolt upright at the head of his table, at about the third round of port.
A branch, or something, outside was casting a shadow on the tent’s canvas wall—as usual, it was in the form of Dante’s profile. She had seen it in patches of damp on ceilings, in burning coals, in the clouds, in shadows cast on the white walls of the bath-room.
Perhaps he had not really looked like that at all, and the famous fresco portrait had been originally merely a patch of damp, elaborated into the outline of a human profile by some wag of the fourteenth century, and called Dante; and perhaps the Dante he meant was not the poet at all, but some popular buffoon, Pantaloon or Harlequin, in the comedies at street corners—the Charlie Chaplin, in fact, of his age....
But for some time Colonel Dundas had been booming away in her right ear, and it was high time she should listen.
“... always a note-book on the links, and every shot recorded—it’s a golden rule. I’ve advised more than one Amateur Champion to follow it. You see my point, don’t you? The next time you play on the same links you whip out your note-book and say, ‘Let me see—Muirfield, sixth hole, Sept. 5, 1920: hit apparently good drive down centre of the course, found almost impossible approach shot owing to cross bunkers. N.B. Keep to the left at the sixth hole.’ You see my point, don’t you?”