“Well, Mater, I’m sorry. I hope you’ll explain to Adela. Got mixed in the date and if it hadn’t been kids I really would in the circumstances—”
The door knob was now in the hand of the heir to the barony. Parthian bolts were launched at him, but he made good his escape.
“It’s a nuisance,” he muttered as he closed the door behind him, “but I really don’t see what’s to be done in the circumstances.”
In the entrance hall he put on his hat and was helped by Joseph into an overcoat with an astrachan collar; from the hall stand he took a whanghee cane with massive silver mountings, and sauntered forth pensively to his house of call, that was not very far from the corner of Hamilton Place.
Arrived at that desirable bourn, his first act was to ring up 00494 Wall.
“That you, Teddy? Have you told the kids to feed early to be in time for the risin’ of the curtain? Yes, I’ve bought the Bukit Rajahs. Think so? Yes, not a minute later than a quarter-past one.”
Replacing the receiver, the heir to the barony of Shelmerdine of Potterhanworth recruited exhausted nature with a whisky and apollinaris, and put forth from the chaste portals of the Button Club. Adventures were lying in wait for him, however.
As he rounded the corner into Piccadilly, a little unwarily, it must be confessed, he nearly collided with the Ne Plus Ultra of fashion in the person of a tall and decidedly smart young woman, in a rather tight black velvet hobble and a charming mutch with a small strip of white fur above the left eyelid.
CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH THE GENTLE READER HAS THE
HONOR OF AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
SEVENTH UNMARRIED DAUGHTER OF NOT
QUITE A HUNDRED EARLS
The Ne Plus Ultra had just achieved the feat of crossing from the Green Park in the charge of a quadruped of whom we are at a loss to furnish a description more explicit. How and why it had been allowed to escape a death by violence at the instance of the passing motor and other mechanically propelled vehicles was yet another of the dark secrets which must be left in the keeping of its Maker.