“I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night,” he said at once, looking at Sir Donald.
“We’ll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford—Mr. Rupert Carey.”
Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.
“Glad to meet you,” he said abruptly. “I’ve carried your Persian poems round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with God-forsaken, glorious old Omar.”
A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald’s hollow cheeks.
“Really,” he said, with obvious embarrassment, “I—they were a great failure. ‘Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in dealing with finance,’ as The Times said in reviewing them.”
“Well, in the course of your career you’ve done some good things for England financially, haven’t you?—not very publicly, perhaps, but as a minister abroad.”
“Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake.”
“Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same though. I saw all the faults and read ‘em twenty times.”
He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.