“Not so bad, is it?” he said carelessly. “Only these fellows are such fools, even the best of them; they always blunder if they can.” With this wholesale condemnation of the workmen among whom, some fifty years ago, his grandfather might have been found, he screwed his eyeglass into his eye, serenely unconscious of the comic effect produced, for the better contemplation of a pretty girl at the farther end of the room. “Lady Pamela looks awfully fit, doesn’t she?” he observed parenthetically; continuing almost in the same breath: “The gardens are the best part, seems to me. Awfully like the real thing, don’t you know!”
Julian’s only direct answer was an expressive gesture of appreciation and apology.
“Awfully well done!” he said. “Excuse me, dear boy, I see my mother, and she’ll want to know why I’ve not turned up before. I must go and explain.”
His companion laughed; the laugh was rather derisive, and the glance he cast on Julian through his eyeglass was stupidly inquisitive and incredulous.
“What a fellow you are, Romayne!” he said. “They ought to put you in a glass case and label you the model son.”
Another gay, expressive gesture from Julian.
“Why not?” he said lightly. “We’re a model pair, you know.”
And the next moment he was threading his way quickly across the room. A sudden movement of the crowd had shown him his mother’s figure, and he had realised instinctively that she had seen him. He came up to her with a manner about which there was something indescribably reckless, and made her a low bow of gay and abject apology.
“I beg ten thousand million pardons!” he said. “Language fails to express my feelings.”