"The roundabout?" interrupted the Duchess. "Didn't I say so?"
"You've been riding?" said the Duke to Mr. Bush. "Good exercise—good for the liver! good for the muscles! Did you get a decent horse?"
Mr. Bush burst forth into a loud guffaw.
"Splendid animal!" cried Mr. Ingerstall. "I rode a pink, he a delicate—a really very delicate—apple-green, with sulphur-coloured spots. The music was that extremely pathetic composition 'Write me a letter from home.' I should have preferred 'Quand les amoureux s'en vont deux par deux'; still, the other really did very well. After dismounting—Bush was thrown, by the way—we spent half an hour in a tent with the bottle imp. Paris would like it. And then we passed on to the two-faced lady, ending up with a cocoanut-shy, which Whistler would love to paint. I really never enjoyed an Ascot so much—never!"
He swallowed a cup of tea as a Soudanese miracle-worker swallows an impromptu bonfire, and leaned back, extending his short legs towards the west, as if in compliment to the approaching sunset. Mrs. Verulam looked with glistening approval at Mr. Bush.
"How original you are," she murmured; "and how bravely simple!" She turned to the house-party. "Should we not all learn to find pleasure in—in what Nature provides for us," she exclaimed, "instead of creating artificial amusements to—to titillate our baser appetites?"
"Does Nature provide apple-green animals with sulphur-coloured spots?" asked Chloe innocently, stroking the place where she was supposed to shave meditatively with her forefinger.
"Nature," said Mr. Rodney, in a voice that quivered and was hoarse with horror—"Nature is—is really scarcely decent."
Mrs. Verulam's approval of Mr. Bush's abominable and Neronic orgy shook him to the soul. That she should praise bottle imps, two-faced females, and speak of the royal Enclosure as ministering to our baser appetites! Even the Mitching Dean grapes lost their colour, their peculiar sweetness, for the moment.
"And all the better for that," began the Duke in his most St. John's Wood manner.