“Mrs. Roderick Capel, a doll of another description.”
“Yes, of the mechanical and talking variety.” Gastineau laughed. “At least, she chattered.”
“About herself the whole time; with a perfect genius for making a long sermon from an unpromising text which must have stirred the admiration of the Dean of Stanborough who was her other neighbour.”
“Ah, she has caught the disease egoitis in a virulent form from her husband who was once a commercial traveller,” Gastineau commented. “He used to travel in millinery: he now travels in Roderick Capel, Esquire, M.P. etc., etc., and with the same push that gave him his first hundred pounds. I know the fellow; won a big case for him about ten years ago. He was so irrepressibly offensive that I nearly threw the brief at his head. The only man I felt I could never snub. Who else?”
“Let me see. Oh, the Tayntons.”
“Don’t know them.”
“Negligible quantities, except so far as the commisariat is concerned. Lady Mary, a greedy monosyllabic nonentity, and he a ventriloquist’s puppet, wooden, and as symmetrical as a wax-work with a movable lower jaw that looks as though it were worked by a string.”
“How ready people are to waste their hospitality on titled lay figures,” Gastineau observed contemptuously.
“Then,” Herriard continued, “there was Briscoe, the new member for Wroxby, very pleased with himself; a wig-block of a Guardsman invited probably for table-dressing purposes; and a German doctor.”
“Variety, at least.” Gastineau lay back with a smile, watching Herriard with half-closed eyes. “What was the German doctor doing there?”