“Not much to tell that would amuse you, I’m afraid. The usual assemblage of self-seekers; I myself being no exception.”
“Yes,” Gastineau agreed, with a little cynical laugh that seemed characteristic of the man. “It is inevitable, as the world goes to-day. All tradesmen, advertising their wares, only in our plane of life they happen to be intellectual goods we want to dispose of. There is not much point in being clever, Geof, unless we bring samples of our brains into market and make the world think the bulk is equal in quality all through.”
“In some, perhaps rare, cases it is,” Herriard observed. “Yours, my dear friend, for instance.”
Gastineau shook his head with a meaning smile. “You didn’t know much of me in my living days. If they were not over I would not tell you what a humbug I was. Oh, yes,” he replied to the other’s gesture of protest; “I had a certain amount of brains, more than most people, if you like; and that is not saying much. But let me assure you, my dear Geof, that their principal employment when I was fighting the world, was in minimizing my defects and exaggerating my cleverness; in short, working with all my might to make the world take me for a wonderfully clever genius, and to ascribe to abnormal brain-power what was really due to carefully directed push and discriminating powers of showing off.”
“It is difficult to believe,” Herriard returned with mock gravity, “in face of the astounding modesty with which you tell it.”
“Ah!” Gastineau sighed wearily, with a strong man’s check on despair. “It is all over now. No more use in keeping on the mask: I can throw it off, and be comfortable. Well, go on about the dinner. The usual dozen and a half of snobs and fools, brave women and fair men, eh?”
“The majority certainly answered your description. Lord and Lady Greystoke were there; he looking something between a professional conjurer and an Italian waiter, she like a faded doll left too long in the toy-shop window and touched up for sale with a dab of vermilion on each cheek.”
“Ah, yes. I remember her years ago. She always had that etiolated look.”
“I wonder how Greystoke, with his taste for southern colouring, came to marry her. He talked Italy all dinner and was hovering about Sicily when I left.”
“She had eight thousand a year,” Gastineau explained, “the depth of the gold at her bankers compensated for the pale straw of her colouring. Whom did you take in?”