At the end of the twenty-fourth verse Mr. Lover presented a bouquet of lilies of the valley, smilax and maidenhair fern to this national heroine. Paid for by the management, saith young friend of the Standard News. May be, young sir, but Marge waved frantically; and the Babe crowed shrilly, and Uncle Philip deplored the fact that he had not had the sense to bring one himself.
We pray of your patience, gentles all, to retain your seats until the Principal Girl has married the Prince. She won’t be long now, that good, brave girl. How she has done it we don’t quite know; and remember, people, what British pluck has already done this afternoon, British pluck will have to do all over again this evening.
“Girl ought to be in bed,” says Harley Street Physician in box, opposite Box B, to old college friend the house surgeon at Bart’s. “She’ll have a temperature if she isn’t careful.”
“She’s given the house a temperature all right,” said the house surgeon at Bart’s, mingling refined humor with grave thoughts like the American judge at the funeral of his mother-in-law.
Kids staying of course for the end of it all. Details much too banal to inflict upon the overwrought patience of the gentle reader. But Father and Uncle Phil, lunchless and thirsty, patient and uncomplaining, though bored to tears, stand as ever at the back of Box B, at the post of duty. Whole-hoggers these upright citizens, though one was the eldest son of a peer and the other connected by marriage with several. But let justice be done to ’em. They would see it all out to the end, in order that Marge and Timothy and Alice Clara and the Babe and Helen and Lucy Nanna should be sent back in taxis to Number 300 Eaton Place, just as they ought to be.
Father’s handicap was four at Prince’s, and he would have much preferred to spend his only free afternoon that week at Mitcham where the common is, and where you can lose a golf ball about as soon as in any other rural spot in Surrey. As for the heir to the barony, as all the world doth know, his path as designed for him that afternoon by the lady his mother, was the Queen’s Hall by Portland Place—that temple of elevated and serious energy, wherein Busoni had designed to charm—and we hope he would be able to do so—the seventh unmarried daughter of not quite a hundred earls.
Don’t think us forward, O ye Liberal organs of opinion, for mentioning details so trite as these; but observe that young plutocrat, that idle, rich young fellow, with astrachan collar and whanghee cane, white spats by Grant and Cockburn, bowler hat by Messrs. Scott—observe him conducting that convoy of motherless kids and their nannas, as simply and politely as though he was the father of ’em—and may he one day have five kids and two quite nice-looking nannas of his own!—conducting ’em through kids in cloaks, kids in mufflers, kids in hats and kids without ’em; through the seething vestibule of Drury, down the steps and round the corner; watch him hail an honest but ill-favored, likewise a dishonest but better favored, motor man. Watch him pack ’em in and give directions, assisted by the unsought attentions of a Distinguished Member of the Great Unwashed.
“Three hundred Eaton Place. Drive slowly.”
Oh, Irony!
Seeks to find a small piece of silver for the Great Unwashed. Can discover four pence merely. Tempered gratitude on part of Great Unwashed. A real Toff never condescends beneath a tanner; and if he hasn’t got one, why, what’s the matter with a bob?