"Oh, rather. Every morning, before brekker. Only I'll mount you. Lots of bosses, all eating their silly heads off. Oh, rot!" he went on, as Harry demurred; "rot, Wiggers, of course I shall mount you. No trouble 't all. Pleasure. You come to England, I mount you. I go to America, you mount me. Turn about, you know."
"I'm afraid not, as we haven't got any saddle horses at present," answered Harry. "You can drive with Aunt Selina in the victoria, though, if you like," he added, smiling at the thought.
"Wot? Wot's that? Delighted, I'm shaw," said Tommy, vaguely scenting an invitation. "Oh, I say, Wiggers, speaking of aunts, wotever became of that jolly cousin of yaws? Carson gell—oldest—sister married Ned Twombly—you know." (For Jane had fulfilled her mission in life by marrying the heir to a thoroughly satisfactory peerage.)
"She's not my cousin," said Harry, "but she's still living in America, keeping house for my aunt—the one I mentioned just now—and doing lots of other things. Settlement work, and such. She and my aunt are thick as thieves."
"I say, how rum. Fancy, gell like that—good looks, and all that—trotting off to do slum work in a foreign country. Wot's the matter with London? Lots of slums here. Can't und'stand it, 't all. Never could und'stand it. Rum."
"Oh, no one ever understands Beatrice," said Harry. "Her friends have given up trying. Well, Tommy, I think I won't go into Truefitt's with you. See you to-morrow morning?"
"Righto—Achilles statue—seven-thirty sharp."
"Righto," answered Harry, and laughed to think how well he said it.
That was the beginning of a long month of gaiety for Harry, a month of theaters and operas, of morning rides in the Row, of endless chains of introductions, of showering invitations, of balls, dinners, parties of all kinds, of lazy week-ends in the Surrey hills or beside the Thames, of sitting, on one occasion at least, enthroned at Aunt Miriam's right hand and gazing down a long table of people who were not only all asked there to meet him but had actually jumped at the invitation; of tasting, in short, the first fruits of success among the most congenial possible surroundings.
And as his relish outlasted the season he saw no reason for not accepting an invitation to a yachting party over Cowes week and another to one of Tommy's ancestral seats in Rosshire over the twelfth; the more so as Uncle Giles and Aunt Miriam decamped for Marienbad early in August. So he became in turn one of the white-flanneled army of pleasure-seekers of the south and one of the brown-tweeded cohorts of the north. His month in Tommydom ran into five, into six, into seven weeks almost before he knew it; it threatened shortly to become two months. And then, instantaneously, the revulsion seized him, even as it had seized him in June at Manresa.