“What, the she-cat with the man’s hair and the telescope? The Lord be good to me. I’d sooner do penal servitude.”
“Now, come, you can see by her glance that she is an authority upon some of the ’isms, McShanus. I know that she plays golf. I saw her carrying sticks this very afternoon.”
“To break heads at a fair. Is Timothy McShanus fallen to this? To tread at the heels of a she-man with sticks in her hands. Faith, ’twould be a fancy fair and fête entirely.”
“Drink some more champagne, and brace yourself up to it, Timothy.”
He shook his head and lapsed into a melancholy silence. Certainly his nerves required bracing up for the ordeal, and many glasses of ’89 Pommery went to that process. When dinner was done, we strolled out upon the verandah and found Miss Fordibras and her chaperone, Miss Aston, drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the vestibule. They made way for us at once, as though we had been expected, and I presented McShanus to them immediately.
“Mr. Timothy McShanus—the author of ‘Ireland and Her Kings.’ He’s descended from the last of them, I believe. Is it not so, McShanus?”
“From all of them, Dr. Fabos. Me father ruled Ireland in the past, and me sons will rule it in the future. Ladies, your servant. Be not after calling me an historian. ’Tis a poet I am when not in the police courts.”
Miss Aston, the elderly lady with the short hair and the glasses, took McShanus seriously, I am afraid. She began to speak to him of Browning and Walt Whitman and Omar Khayyam. I drew my chair near to Miss Fordibras and took my text from the common talk.
“No one reads poetry nowadays,” I said. “We have all grown too cynical. Even McShanus does not consider his immortal odes worth publishing.”
“They will perish with me in an abbey tomb,” said he; “a thousand years from now, ’tis the professors from New Zealand who will tell the world what McShanus wrote.”