was thoroughly amused, and indeed at the height of one of her Platonic
flirtations with the new possessor of the Soul (a young man in the
Foreign Office, with lovely hair parted in the middle, charming
whiskers, and brilliant teeth), he (Gilbert Lloyd) had not shown the
smallest symptom of jealousy. On the contrary, Gilbert Lloyd was
unfeignedly glad to find that his place had been satisfactorily filled
up, and that he would no longer be constantly required to be on
escort-duty. And when Lady Carabas found that this was the case--and
she discovered it very quickly, being a woman of great worldly
penetration and tact--she made up her mind that the best thing for her
to do was to accept the position at once, and give Lloyd his liberty.
This accordingly she did; and when they met at Baden,
"They seemed to those who saw them meet,
Mere casual friends of every day;"
as Lord Houghton says in a very charming little poem, though there was
an echo of bygone tenderness, of the voice of the Soul, in fact,
pervading her ladyship's tones for many a day after. Meantime she was
the queen of a very pleasant little coterie. Half the frequenters of
Carabas House did a little passing homage at her ladyship's temporary
court at Baden on their way to and from the other watering-places. The
promenade contained types of all the people usually seen seated on the
Hyde-Park chairs, with a large sprinkling of others never seen in that
aristocratic locality. For though H.R.H. the Duke of Brentford, the
captains and commanders and mighty men of valour, the senators, the
clerks in the government offices, and the nothing-doers have plenty of
time to lounge about in London, the working-bees--the judges and
barristers, the doctors, the civil-engineers, the cunning workers
in ink and pigment, all of whom grind their brains to make their
bread--have no such opportunity when in town, and are only seen idling
in daylight during their brief autumn holiday. "Society"--except that
Carabas-House set, which knew them very well--stared very much at most
of these people, and called Jack Hawkes of the F. O. to its aid to
explain who they were; and Jack Hawkes, who was only too delighted to
act as cicerone to society when it had a handle to its name,
explained, "Tall man with the round high shoulders and the long gray
hair is great lady's doctor, don't you know? uses up three pair of
horses a-day whippin' about town; that's his wife and daughter with
him--think her pretty, the daughter? nice-lookin' they call her. The
man with the red face, not him in the white hat--that's Kollum the
portrait-painter; that one in the wideawake is Sir Blewson Bagge, one
of the judges--say he knows more law than any other three men in
England The fat man with the cigar is Protheroe, and the man
talkin' to him dressed all in black is Tuberville; they're great
engineers--one laid out the John o' Groat's and Land's End Extension
Line, and the other designed the Channel-Islands Submarine Railway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account