“Ah, but he was careful, as careful as a good parti has to be in the London season. He lent them his books, and guanoed their minds thoroughly, but he always sheered off when they showed signs of taking him seriously.”
“Chose married women to flirt with, for preference? What does the wife say?”
“The wife? So there is a wife! But no one has ever seen her. Perpetual hay-fever, or something of the sort.”
“That is what Vero-Taylor gives out.”
“Oh, I don’t really think there is anything in—with Lady Scilly, I mean. He is too selfish—they are both too selfish. Those sort of women are like the Leaning Tower, they lean but never fall. It is an alliance of interest, so to speak. He introduces the literary element into her parties, and writes her novel for her, and in return she flatters him and takes his daughter out. Poor girl, she would be quite pretty, if she were properly dressed, but the mediæval superstition, you know—she has to dress like a Monna Somebody or other, so as to advertise his books. I believe she did refuse to have her hair shaved off her forehead à la Rimini, but she mostly has to comply——”
“Well, I never heard of a man using his daughter as a sandwich-man before. Which is she?”
Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen pointed out Ariadne, whose bath-towel was tumbling all over her eyes.
“She looks half-starved!” said The Bittern man.
“My dear man,” said Sulphuretta Hydrogen, “don’t you know that they have a crank about meals, and refuse to have them regularly? I am told that they have a kind of buttery-hatch—a cold pie always cut in the cupboard, and they go and put their heads in and eat a bit when so disposed.”
“Well, they are free, at any rate—free from the trammels of custom——”