"Yes," said the young gentleman, still looking at Mrs. Verulam.
"Oh yes," she began feebly. "Oh yes, yes——"
"Might I ask for a cup of tea, Mrs. Verulam?" he exclaimed, in what might, with but slight exaggeration, be called a voice of thunder.
"Certainly," she answered, putting about fifteen lumps of sugar with a shaking hand into the nearest cup. "You don't take sugar, I think?"
"Gouty?" said her Grace. "Ah, you and Pearl would sympathise. Let me introduce you to my girl. Mr. Van Adam—Lady Pearl McAndrew."
Bows.
"I am not gouty, mother," Lady Pearl said, in her morose voice. "I am only melancholy. And that"—she addressed herself to the tweed suit—"is because I cannot, I will not, blind myself to the actual condition of the world I see around me."
"Oh, my dear," said the Duchess, "Carlsbad would cure you. But," she added to the tweed suit, "unfortunately, I can't afford to send her there just at present."
The Lady Pearl grew large with vexation, as people of sensitive nature will when, having elaborately surrounded themselves with an interesting atmosphere, they find it ruthlessly dissipated by a Philistine allusion to uric acid. She seemed about to make some almost apoplectic rejoinder when Mr. Rodney mellifluously chipped in.
"I believe in the climate of Florida gout is practically unknown," he said, speaking obliquely towards the tweed suit. "My friend, Lord Bernard Roche"—he paused, expectant of some eager exclamation from the person whom Lord Bernard in his letters called "poor old Huskinson." But none came. "Lord Bernard Roche, now in New York—City"—he again paused, and once more in vain—"tells me so."