“I don’t blame your kicking them for a moment. I blame your legs being under their dinner-tables while you do it.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Daddy. “‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,’ and if there’s a good cook in a house I go there.”
“There are good cooks at the Clubs.”
“Passable. But when I dine at a club I have to pay for my dinner,” said Gwyllian with a chuckle. “I don’t borrow money, but I like to save it. I should not pay a guinea for a peach, but a couple of guinea peaches taste uncommon good when somebody else provides ’em.”
“What a beast you make yourself out, Daddy!”
“I’m a man of my time, dear boy,” said Gwyllian, as he opened a silver cigarette-case which a pretty woman had won at a bazaar raffle and given to him.
Daddy was popular with both the sexes. Everybody liked him, though nobody could tell why they did so.
He was one of those men who do nothing all their lives except run to and fro society like dogs in a fair. He was of ancient descent, and had enough to live on, as a bachelor, without, as he had averred, ever wanting to borrow half-a-crown of anybody. He had a little nest of three rooms in Albemarle Street, full of pretty things which had all been given him chiefly by ladies, and he was seen in London, in Paris, in Homburg, in Cowes, in Cannes, in Monaco, in Biarritz, at the height of their respective seasons with unvarying regularity: farther afield he did not go often; he liked to have his familiar world about him.
He was now an old man, and to the younger generation seemed patriarchal; he had been called Daddy for more years than anybody could remember. But he was healthy and strong, for he had always taken care of himself; he could shoot with the best of them still, and could sit up all night and look fresh and rosy after his shower-bath in the morning.
“You young ’uns have no stamina,” he said once to Brancepeth when he found that young man measuring the drops of his digitalis. “It is the way you were brought up. In my time we were fed on bread and milk, and rice-pudding, and wore low frocks till we were eight or nine, and never even saw what the grown-up folks ate. You were all of you muffled up to your chins in the nurseries, and got at by the doctors, and plied with wine and raw meat, and told that you had livers and lungs and digestions before you could toddle, and given claret and what not at luncheon, and made old men of you before you were boys. Dilitation of the heart, have you got? Hypertrophy, eh? Lord bless my soul, you shouldn’t know you’ve got a heart, except as a figure of speech, when you swear it away to a woman.”