“Thank you, George,” said the old lady with formidable politeness. “Regular habits and a good conscience are worth something when you get past seventy.”
George Betterton, Duke of Brancaster, began to gobble like a turkey. He was a heavy-jowled, purple-faced, apoplectic-looking individual, rather wide in stature and extremely short in the neck. So famous was he for his powers of emulation of the pride of the farmyard, that he went by the name of “Gobo” among his friends. As his habits were not so regular and his conscience was not so chaste as they might have been, George Betterton grew redder in the jowl than ever, and rolled his full-blooded eyes at the occupant of the yellow chariot.
“Something been crossing you, Caroline?” inquired her old crony, in his heavy, slow-witted way.
“Yes and no,” said the occupant of the chariot with that bluntness of speech in which none excelled her. “Ponto is getting fat, and Burden is getting tiresome, and Cheriton has been insolent, and I am tired of life; but I intend to hold on some time yet just to spite people. It is all the better for the world to have an old nuisance or two in it.”
This philanthropic resolution did not appear to arouse as much enthusiasm in George Betterton as perhaps it ought to have done. All the same he was very polite in his gruff, stolid, John Bull manner.
“Glad to hear it, Caroline,” said he. “We should never get on, you know, without your old standards.”
“Rubbish,” said the old lady robustly. “You would only be too pleased to. But you won’t at present, so make your mind easy.”
The occupant of the yellow chariot flung up her nostrils as if to challenge high heaven with a snuff of scorn.
“What are you doing in London?” said the old lady. “That woman is at Biarritz, they tell me.”
George Betterton pondered a moment and measured his old friend with his full-blooded eye.