“I have a headache, Mario,” he told his man (a Neapolitan who had been attached to almost as many professions as his master). “I shall not leave my room! Give me a kimono: I will take a bath.”
Undressing slowly, he felt as the garments dropped away, he was acting properly in refraining from attending the soirée, and only hoped the lesson would not be “lost” on Lady Something, whom he feared must be incurably dense.
Lying amid the dissolving bath crystals while his man-servant deftly bathed him, he fell into a sort of coma, sweet as a religious trance. Beneath the rhythmic sponge, perfumed with Kiki, he was St Sebastian, and as the water became cloudier and the crystals evaporated amid the steam, he was Teresa ... and he would have been, most likely, the Blessed Virgin herself, but that the bath grew gradually cold.
“You’re looking a little pale, sir, about the gills!” the valet solicitously observed, as he gently dried him.
The Hon. ‘Eddy’ winced: “I forbid you ever to employ the word gill, Mario,” he exclaimed. “It is inharmonious, and in English it jars; whatever it may do in Italian.”
“Overtired, sir, was what I meant to say.”
“Basta!” his master replied, with all the brilliant glibness of the Berlitz-school.
Swathed in towels, it was delicious to relax his powder-blanched limbs upon a comfy couch, while Mario went for dinner: “I don’t care what it is! So long as it isn’t—”(naming several dishes that he particularly abhorred, or might be “better,” perhaps, without)—” And be sure, fool, not to come back without Champagne.”
He could not choose but pray that the Ambassadress had nothing whatever to do with the Embassy cellar, for from what he had seen of her already, he had only a slight opinion of her discernment.
Really he might have been excused had he taken her to be the cook instead of the social representative of the Court of St James, and he was unable to repress a caustic smile on recollecting her appearance that afternoon, with her hat awry, crammed with Maréchal Niel roses, hot, and decoiffed, flourishing a pair of garden-gauntlets as she issued her commands. What a contrast to his own Mamma—“so different,” ... and his thoughts returned to Intriguer—“dear Intriguer, ...” that if only to vex his father’s ghost, he would one day turn into a Jesuit college! The Confessional should be fitted in the paternal study, and engravings of the Inquisition, or the sweet faces of Lippi and Fra Angelico, replace the Agrarian certificates and tiresome trophies of the chase; while the crack of the discipline in Lent would echo throughout the house! How “useful” his friend Robbie Renard would have been; but alas poor Robbie. He had passed through life at a rapid canter, having died at nineteen....