A few days later I called on my predecessor, Dr. Whittington, and found him sitting in his garden at East Sheen. He was, as always, communicative and genial, but it was evident that his interest in his late patients had migrated to his roses.
“Mrs. Robinson is an egregious goose, my dear Giles, as you must have already perceived, but she is a goose that lays golden eggs. You simply can’t go too often to please them. I went nearly every day, and they constantly asked me to dinner. They have an excellent cook.”
“They adored you,” I said.
“They did; and some great writer has said somewhere that we must pay the penalty for our deepest affections. I—ahem! exacted the penalty; you see part of the results in my Malmaisons, and I advise you to follow in my footsteps. They are made of money.”
“They look it.”
“And they are, if I may say so, a private preserve. They know nobody. I always thought that everybody knew somebody, at any rate every one who is wealthy, but they don’t seem to know a soul. If you dine there you’ll meet a High Church parson whom they sit under, or the family solicitor, or a servile female imbecile who was Arthur’s governess, and laughs at everything he says—no one else.”
“Didn’t he go to school?”
“Never. His mother said it would break his spirit. I’ve attended him from his birth. A very costly affair that was to Mrs. Robinson, for I had to live in the house for weeks, in order to help to usher in young Robinson, and at the same time usher out old Robinson, noisily dying of locomotor ataxia, and drink on the ground floor. I’ve since come to the conclusion that she never was legally his wife, and that is why they know no one, and don’t seem to make any effort socially. She had all the money, there’s no doubt of that, and she wasn’t by any means in her first youth. I rather think he must have been a bigamist or something large hearted of that kind. Perhaps like Henry the Eighth he suffered from a want of concentration of the domestic affections.”