Philip muttered something about its being "rather small."
"Well, sir, it is rather small, as you say, sir. I could have wished to have given you a better, but you see, sir, I kep the best room in the 'ouse for the Curnle; and then there was the majors, and his lordship here, Captain Lord Henry Ughtred, had bespoke a good room more than six weeks ago; so you see, sir, I wasn't quite free to serve you quite so well as I could have wished. Sorry we can't content all gentlemen, sir. What will you take to breakfast, Captain Stanburne? Would you like a boiled hegg, new-laid, or a little fried 'am, or shall I cut you some cold meat; there's four kinds of cold meat on the sideboard, besides a cold beefsteak-pie?"
As he finished his sentence, Mr. Garley drew a chair out, the seat of which had been under the table, and, with a mixture of servility and patronage (servility because he was temporarily acting the part of a waiter, patronage because he still knew himself to be Mr. Garley of the Thorn Hotel), he invited Philip Stanburne to sit down. The other gentlemen at the table had not been engaged in a very animated conversation, and they suspended it by mutual consent to have a good stare at the new-comer. For it so happened that these men were the swell clique, which had for its head Captain Lord Henry Ughtred, and for its vice-captain the Honorable Fortunatus Brabazon; and the swell clique had determined in its own corporate mind that it would have as little to do with the snobs of Sootythorn as might be. It was apprehensive of a great influx of the snob element into the regiment. There was a belief or suspicion in the clique that there existed cads even amongst the captains; and as the officers had not yet met together, a feeling of great circumspection predominated amongst the members of the clique. Philip Stanburne ventured to observe that it was a fine morning; but although his next neighbor admitted that fact, he at once allowed the conversation to drop. Mr. Garley had given Philip his first cup of tea; but, in his temporary absence, Philip asked a distinguished member of the swell clique for a second. The liquid was not refused, yet there was something in the manner of giving it which might have turned the hottest cup of tea in Lancashire to a lump of solid ice. At length Lord Henry Ughtred, having for a length of time fixed his calm blue eyes on Philip (they were pretty blue eyes, and he had nice curly hair, and a general look of an overgrown Cupid), said,—
"Pray excuse me; did I not hear Mr. Garley say that your name was Stanburne?"
"Yes, my name is Stanburne."
"Are you Colonel Stanburne's brother, may I ask?"
"No; the Colonel has no brothers."
"Ah, true, true; I had forgotten. Of course, I knew Stanburne had no brothers. Indeed, he told me he'd no relations—or something of the kind. You're not a relation of his, I presume; you don't belong to his family, do you?"
Philip Stanburne, in these matters, had very much of the feeling of a Highland chief. He was the representative of the Stanburnes, and the Colonel was head of a younger branch only. So when he was asked in this way whether he belonged to the Colonel's family, he at once answered "no," seeing that the Colonel belonged to his family, not he to the Colonel's. He was irritated, too, by the tone of his questioner; and, besides, such a relationship as the very distant one between himself and Colonel Stanburne was rather a matter for poetical sentiment than for the prose of the outer world.
Mr. Garley only made matters worse by putting his word in. "Beg pardon, Captn Stanburne, but I've always 'eard say that your family was a younger branch of the Wendrum family."