Mrs. Pointzby-North, fluttering somewhat:
“My dear Captain O’Hagan! As if you could offend me, however hard you tried!”
O’Hagan inclined his head, and raised the monocle to survey the expectant ring of guests. Then:
“Good folks, Miss Pamela Crichton is so well worth listening to, that I beg you will preserve a perfect quiet whilst she is playing. Believe me, you will be well repaid, and will furthermore confer upon Mrs. North and upon myself a favour which we shall deeply appreciate!”
Pamela performed amid a throbbing silence which would have gratified Sarah Bernhardt. But I divined how in future the doors of Mrs. Pointzby-North would be closed to Miss Crichton.
(“It is better,” O’Hagan explained to me, when we had seen the girl to a cab. “I do not desire that Pamela be treated as a public exhibit.”)
Replace the famous cloak with a toga, and in O’Hagan you have a very complete patrician—an aristocrat of sensibilities so exquisite that the trifling errors of good society jar upon them more harshly than the eating of peas with a knife upon the atrophied perceptions of the merely respectable.
After dinner that evening Sir Roger Rundel called upon O’Hagan in his chambers.
My friend’s chambers overlook Whitehall, and, in his moments of ease, he is always to be found in the room which he calls his library, but whose appointments more nearly correspond with those of a harêm. To visitors but superficially acquainted with O’Hagan, this apartment proves a surprise. Its arabesques dimly perceptible in the blue rays of a hanging lamp, the plash of water in a tiny marble basin enhancing the illusion that one has lost one’s way, this mandarah possesses all the charms of the unexpected.
For golden carp in the basin you are of course prepared? Prepare, further, for O’Hagan in a loose blue robe, O’Hagan extended upon a cushioned divan, sipping coffee from a tiny porcelain cup and enjoying the solace of tumbâk in a Persian narghli.