Courtley nodded.
"They call her one at the Admiralty just by way of being funny. When they've scraped off the dirt enough to get at her, she may turn out to be a first-class protected cruiser. Twenty months out of commission—and mobilised for the Spithead Naval Review."
"Ought one to be glad? ... Does it mean that we're to congratulate you on promotion?" asked puzzled Lady Beauvayse.
"Well," Courtley admitted cautiously, "when I've got my full-dress frock-coat and sword out of pawn, and hoisted my pennant and called on the post Commander-in-Chief—I shall be something between a Rear-Admiral and a Post Captain—or they'll have told me wrong."
"And the Review—what do you call it?" persisted Lady Beauvayse. "Can one go and see it—whenever it comes off?"
"It'll be big enough to see—with a stiffish pair of binkies," admitted Courtley in his gentlest manner; "and the newspapers seem to have arranged it for somewhere in the middle of the month. As to what you're to call it—if you called it an Object Lesson on the biggest scale for the use of German Kultur Classes, perhaps you wouldn't be very wide of the bull."
He got up before Lady Beauvayse could rejoin, and had met Patrine, and engineered her into his vacated seat next her friend upon the divan almost before she knew. She lowered her tall person upon the cushions, studiously avoiding von Herrnung's glances. She wore a white embroidered gown of cobwebby material and extreme scantiness, a stole of black cock's feathers was looped about her shoulders, and on her dead beech-leaf-coloured hair sat a curious little hat of glittering silver spangles, from which sprang a single black cock's plume.
"What have you all been talking about?" she asked, looking about her.
Lady Wastwood, who sat near, answered, balancing her long, slim, fragile personality on the fender-stool before the hearth that was filled with tall ferns and flowering plants in pots:
"We were saying—what a wretched pity the process of racial reproduction is so abominably unbecoming. It really points to a loose style of reasoning on the part of Nature—or whoever it is who arranges these things!"