“Ah!” Gastineau sighed wearily, with a strong man’s check on despair. “It is all over now. No more use in keeping on the mask: I can throw it off, and be comfortable. Well, go on about the dinner. The usual dozen and a half of snobs and fools, brave women and fair men, eh?” “The majority certainly answered your description. Lord and Lady Greystoke were there; he looking something between a professional conjurer and an Italian waiter, she like a faded doll left too long in the toy-shop window and touched up for sale with a dab of vermilion on each cheek.” “Ah, yes. I remember her years ago. She always had that etiolated look.” “I wonder how Greystoke, with his taste for southern colouring, came to marry her. He talked Italy all dinner and was hovering about Sicily when I left.” “She had eight thousand a year,” Gastineau explained, “the depth of the gold at her bankers compensated for the pale straw of her colouring. Whom did you take in?” “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?” “Come over here for some big operation, I heard.” “Ah! What is his name?” “I did not catch it.” “Ah!” Gastineau’s eyes contracted curiously. “He did not interest you?” “Not particularly. Although he was probably the most interesting person there. But he was not near me; I had, when the ladies went, to endure the banal egoism of my fellow M.P.”