“Letters?”
“Naturally, there would be letters, sir. It is an inseparable feature of these cases.”
“Do you mean that I have got to write to her? But I shouldn't know what to say. I've never seen her.”
“That will be quite all right, sir, if you place yourself in my hands. I will come to your room after everybody's gone to bed, and help you write those letters. You have some note-paper with your own address on it? Then it will all be perfectly simple.”
When, some hours later, he read over the ten or twelve exceedingly passionate epistles which, with the butler's assistance, he had succeeded in writing to Miss Maud Chilvers, Roland came to the conclusion that there must have been a time when Mr. Teal was a good deal less respectable than he appeared to be at present. Byronic was the only adjective applicable to his collaborator's style of amatory composition. In every letter there were passages against which Roland had felt compelled to make a modest protest.
“'A thousand kisses on your lovely rosebud of a mouth.' Don't you think that is a little too warmly colored? And 'I am languishing for the pressure of your ivory arms about my neck and the sweep of your silken hair against my cheek!' What I mean is—well, what about it, you know?”
“The phrases,” said Mr. Teal, not without a touch of displeasure, “to which you take exception, are taken bodily from correspondence (which I happened to have the advantage of perusing) addressed by the late Lord Evenwood to Animalcula, Queen of the High Wire at Astley's Circus. His lordship, I may add, was considered an authority in these matters.”
Roland criticized no more. He handed over the letters, which, at Mr. Teal's direction, he had headed with various dates covering roughly a period of about two months antecedent to his arrival at the Towers.
“That,” Mr. Teal explained, “will make your conduct definitely unpardonable. With this woman's kisses hot upon your lips,”—Mr. Teal was still slightly aglow with the fire of inspiration—“you have the effrontery to come here and offer yourself to her ladyship.”
With Roland's timid suggestion that it was perhaps a mistake to overdo the atmosphere, the butler found himself unable to agree.