“I believe he’s a cousin of mine.”
Bertha’s father, who made a practice of quarrelling with all his relations, had found in General Vaudrey a brother-in-law as irascible as himself; so that the two families had never been on speaking term.
“I’ve just had a letter from his mother to say that he’s been—er, philandering rather violently with her maid, and they’re all in despair. The maid has been sent away in hysterics, his mother and his sister are in tears, and the General’s in a passion and says he won’t have the boy in his house another day. And the little wretch is only nineteen. Disgraceful, isn’t it?”
“Disgraceful!” said Bertha, smiling. “I wonder what there is in a French maid that small boys should invariably make love to her.”
“Oh, my dear, if you only saw my sister’s maid. She’s forty if she’s a day, and her complexion is like parchment very much the worse for wear.... But the awful part of it is that your Aunt Betty beseeches me to look after the boy. He’s going to Florida in a month, and meanwhile he’s to stay in London. Now, what I want to know, is how am I to keep a dissolute infant out of mischief. Is it the sort of thing that one would expect of me?”
Miss Ley waved her arms with comic desperation.
“Oh, but it’ll be great fun. We’ll reform him together. We’ll lead him on a path where French maids are not to be met at every turn and corner.”
“My dear, you don’t know what he is. He’s an utter young scamp. He was expelled from Rugby. He’s been to half-a-dozen crammers, because they wanted him to go to Sandhurst, but he utterly refused to work; and he’s been ploughed in every exam he’s gone in for—even for the militia. So now his father has given him five hundred pounds and told him to go to the devil.”
“How rude! But why should the poor boy go to Florida?”
“I suggested that. I know some people who’ve got an orange plantation there. And I dare say that the view of several miles of orange blossom will suggest to him that promiscuous flirtation may have unpleasant results.”