He lifted his eyebrows in interrogation, and the eyeglass leaped into the folds of his well-chosen cravat, the kind of subdued yet hopeful thing in shades a man of taste and brains would put on to propose in.
“My dear Sir Robert,� Mrs. Magellison said, in well-chosen language and with an icy little smile, “I am not an adept in the use of sporting phraseology. Captain Magellison is of studious habits, retiring nature, and—shall I say?—an indolent disposition. It would not very well become me if I insisted on his society when he is not disposed to bestow it upon me, and therefore I generally go out alone. When, unless I give a formal dinner, upon which an occasion my husband must necessarily take his place at the other end of the board—when I entertain intimates——�
“You put your people at a round table,� said Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere. “And a round table is the very deuce—and—all for obliterating a husband!� He found his eyeglass and screwed it firmly in.
“I do not altogether blame the table,� said Mrs. Magellison coldly. “Because, upon nine occasions out of ten my husband prefers a cutlet in his rooms. Pray do not suppose that I find fault with the preference. He is not by nature sociable, as I have said, and prefers to follow, at Edengates and in Scotland and in Paris, as well as here in town, his own peculiar bent. And what that is you are probably aware?� She turned her head with a superb movement, and her helmet of pale hair gleamed in the wintry sunshine that streamed through the lace blinds of the Chesterfield Crescent drawing-room.
“I had a general idea,� said the man she addressed, who, hampered in early life by the fact of being born a Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, had not succeeded in being anything else, “that the late—I beg your pardon!—the present Captain Magellison was—I should say is—a Scientific Buffer—of sorts!�
Mrs. Magellison smiled coldly and rose.
“The term you employ is slang, of course,� she said, “but it is quite appropriate and really descriptive. My husband was once a famous man, he is now a Scientific Buffer—and as you say—of sorts. Would you like to see him?�
She moved to the drawing-room door and turned her head with another fine movement, and Hawting-Holliday’s eclectic taste was charmed with the sculpturesque pose. He followed her and they crossed a landing, and Mrs. Magellison knocked at the door of one of a suite of rooms that had been thrown out over what had been a back-yard. And as nobody said “Come in,� she entered, followed by the visitor.
II
The room was long, carpeted but uncurtained, and lighted by that most depressing of all forms of illumination, a skylight. Dwarf bookcases ran round it, and the walls were covered with frames and glass cases, primitive weapons, and a multitude of quaint and curious things. There was a low couch, covered with seal skins and feather rugs, and a leather writing-chair was set at the table, which had on it a fine microscope and many scientific instruments, of which the uses were unknown to the head of the Hawting-Hollidays of Hirlmere. Piles of dusty papers there were, and a couple of battered ship’s logs, stained and discolored by sea-water and grease. And in the writing-chair, with his feet on a magnificent Polar bear-skin and the receiver of a telephone at his ear, sat the Scientific Buffer of sorts, staring fixedly before him, apparently over an illimitable waste of frozen drift-ice covering uncharted Polar seas.