"Never mind the Missus!" said the Man of Destiny, with a comic half-cock of the left eye at the patrician aspect of her Grace. "It's only her fun."
The man's effrontery, his cynicism, his absence of taste, were staggering. But what a sublime courage the fellow had. On he sauntered, with his hands buried in his pockets, in the wake of Coverdale and her Royal Highness. Brasset and I, walking delicately, were crowding upon his heels, when what can only be described as a peremptory and insistent hiss recalled us to the danger zone.
"Reggie! Odo Arbuthnot!"
We proffered a forlorn salute to the most august of her sex.
"Beg pardon, Mrs. Catesby, didn't see you, y'know."
Brasset's apologetic feebleness was in singular and painful contrast to the epic breadth of the inconceivable Fitz.
"Don't dare to offer me a word, either of you," said the Great Lady, in a whisper of Homeric truculence. "You are committing the act of social suicide. When I think of your mother, Reggie, and of your wife and daughter, Odo Arbuthnot, I——but I will say nothing. But it is social suicide for all of you, including that fatuous police constable."
The flesh cannot endure more than a given amount of suffering, although the measure of its capacity is so terrible. But whatever it was, I was already past it.
"Pink is certainly a trying colour," I whispered.
"Dear Evelyn will never forgive it. Have none of you a sense of decency? It is madness!"