In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of those quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called “the silly haw-haw” of some Englishmen, the “flapping cockatoory” of some English-women—Holly had none of that and Holly was his model. Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:
“Mr. Val Dartie? How's Mrs. Val Dartie? She's well, I hope.” And he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.
“Prosper Profond—I met you at lunch,” said the voice.
“How are you?” murmured Val.
“I'm very well,” replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain inimitable slowness. “A good devil,” Holly had called him. Well! He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly intelligent.
“Here's a gentleman wants to know you—cousin of yours—Mr. George Forsyde.”
Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at the Iseeum Club.
“I used to go racing with your father,” George was saying: “How's the stud? Like to buy one of my screws?”
Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen out of breeding. They believed in nothing over here, not even in horses. George Forsyte, Prosper Profond! The devil himself was not more disillusioned than those two.
“Didn't know you were a racing man,” he said to Monsieur Profond.