“You are always late,” Mrs. Montford said reproachfully. “I suppose that is because you are the idlest man I know.”
He was a favourite of Mrs. Montford’s—l’ami de la maison—and allowed to come and go as he pleased. When he gave a tea-party it was generally Mrs. Montford who invited half the company, helped him to choose the flowers and to receive the guests.
“You have hit the mark,” he said. “A man who has no specific occupation never has time to be punctual. Nobody respects him. He can’t look at his watch in the middle of a friend’s prosing and pretend important business. I think I shall article myself to a civil engineer; and then when people are boring I can say I am waited for about the caissons for the new bridge. What bridge? My dear fellow, no time to explain! One springs into a hansom, and is gone. Your idler can’t extricate himself from the Arachne web of boredom. His time is everybody’s property.”
“Elaborate, but not convincing,” said Mrs. Montford, smiling at him, as he helped himself with a leisurely air to a cutlet en papillote. “I would wager all the gloves that I shall wear at Etretat that you were lying in your easiest chair, with your feet on that high fender of yours, reading Maupassant’s new story.”
“For once in your life you have succeeded as a reader of character—or no character. I was reading ‘Le Pas Perdu.’ Don’t you see how red my eyelids are?”
“Exactly. You are the kind of man who can weep over a book and refuse a sovereign to a poor relation.”
“That,” said Sefton, “was almost unkind.”
Sophy now claimed her right of being talked to.
“Why were you not at Lady Dalborough’s last night?” she asked.
“My dear Miss Marchant, you can’t expect to see me at all the stupidest parties in London.”