“Is Viscount Medenham also in your party?” inquired the bookkeeper.
“Yes.”
Again no demur was raised, since the Earl’s repeated demands for information as to Miss Vanrenen’s whereabouts showed that some sort of link must exist between him and the missing tourists.
Medenham sat in his car outside and read:
My Dear George—If this reaches you, please oblige me by returning to town at once. Your aunt is making a devil of a fuss, and is most unpleasant. I say no more now, since I am not sure that you will be in Hereford before we meet.
Yours ever,
F.
“I can see myself being very angry with Aunt Susan,” he growled in the first flush of resentment against the unfairness of her attitude.
But that phase soon passed. His mind dwelt rather on Lady St. Maur’s bland amazement when she encountered Cynthia. He could estimate with some degree of precision her ladyship’s views regarding the eighty millions of citizens of the United States; had she not said in his hearing that “American society was evidently quite English—but with the head cut off?”
That, and a sarcastic computation as to the difference between Ten Thousand and Four Hundred, constituted her knowledge of America. Still, he made excuses for her. It was no new thing for an aristocracy to be narrow-minded. Horace, that fine gentleman, “hated the vulgar crowd,” and Nicolo Machiavelli, fifteen centuries later, denounced the nobles of Florence for their “easy-going contempt of everything and everybody”; so Lady St. Maur had plenty of historical precedent for the coining of cheap epigrams.