“Why not? But Lady Sellingworth is definitely not one.”
“How so? I must deny that, really. I know these young poets and painters like to imagine that everyone who has had the great honour of living under Queen Victoria—”
“Forgive me! It isn’t that at all.”
“Well, then—oh, our dry Martinis! How much is it, waiter?”
“Two shillings, sir.”
“Two—thank you. Well, then, Craven, I affirm that Lady Sellingworth is as much a Georgian as any young person who writes bad poetry in Cheyne Walk or paints impossible pictures in Glebe Place.”
“She would deny that. She said, in my presence and in that of Sir Seymour Portman and Miss Van Tuyn, that she did not belong to this age.”
“What an—what an extraordinary statement!” said Braybrooke, drinking down his second cocktail at a gulp.
“She said she was—or rather, had been—an Edwardian. She would not have it that she belonged to the present day at all.”
“A whim! It must have been a whim! The best of women are subject to caprice. It is the greatest mistake to class yourself as belonging to the past. It dates you. It—it—it practically inters you!”