Let it go! What were its sounds to me? If I were starving, I could not descend in my present costume.
“Sir Geoffry Didcote begs me to say, sir, that he waits on you in order to enter the dining-room,” mournfully announced the dismal servitor.
“Please say to Sir Geoffry that I don’t feel quite well—that I will go down by and by.”
“Thank you, sir.” This was uttered as if he wished to say: “I am glad that you are dying. I knew how it would be—you couldn’t deceive me.”
The man had scarcely time to deliver my message ere Sir Geoffry himself panted and puffed into my apartment.
“My dear sir—aw—I hope—aw—that you are not—aw—ill. It would—aw—grieve me very much”—here he availed himself of my mirror to adjust his spotless white choker—“if—aw—upon your—aw—first visit you—aw—became indisposed.”
Honesty, thought I, is the best policy, and it saves a lot of trouble; so I made a clean breast of it to the pompous baronet.
“How very unfortunate—aw—for the lady! We will dispense—aw—with ceremony under—aw—the peculiar, not to say delicate—aw—circumstances of the case, and Lady Didcote will—aw—receive you in your—aw—present attire. You can telegraph—aw—for reinforcements, which—aw—will arrive on—aw—Monday morning.”
I could not see the force of this. I might easily telegraph for reinforcements, but would they come? Secondly, as my visit was to terminate upon Monday, reinforcements were not necessary, unless they could be brought up at once. I begged to be excused from attending table; but this he would not listen to, and, as he informed me that I was keeping dinner waiting, there was nothing for it but to descend with him.
I have, when a boy, been lugged into the school-room to suffer condign punishment; at a later period I have been forced into the presence of a young lady of whom I was deeply enamored; I have had to march up to the pulpit in Trinity College dining-hall to repeat the long Latin grace amid the muffled gibes of my peers; I have been placed in positions where my bashfulness has been ruthlessly tortured and my retiring modesty tried by fire and water; but never did I experience the pangs of the rack until the full blaze of that drawing-room burst upon my vision. The apartment appeared to swim round, carrying with it the form of a hooked-nosed dowager in a turban, who screwed an eye-glass into the corner of a wicked old eye, to have a good stare at the strange figure her husband had introduced into her salon.