Lady Barb, after this, didn’t decline to see her New York acquaintances
on Sunday afternoons, though she refused for the present to enter into a
project of her husband’s, who thought it would be pleasant she should
entertain his friends on the evening of that day. Like all good
Americans, Doctor Lemon devoted much consideration to the great question
of how, in his native land, society was to be brought into being. It
seemed to him it would help on the good cause, for which so many
Americans are ready to lay down their lives, if his wife should, as he
jocularly called it, open a saloon. He believed, or tried to believe,
the _salon_ now possible in New York on condition of its being reserved
entirely for adults; and in having taken a wife out of a country in which
social traditions were rich and ancient he had done something toward
qualifying his own house—so splendidly qualified in all strictly material
respects—to be the scene of such an effort. A charming woman accustomed
only to the best on each side, as Lady Beauchemin said, what mightn’t she
achieve by being at home—always to adults only—in an easy early inspiring
comprehensive way and on the evening of the seven when worldly
engagements were least numerous? He laid this philosophy before Lady
Barb in pursuance of a theory that if she disliked New York on a short
acquaintance she couldn’t fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed in
the New York mind—not so much indeed in its literary artistic philosophic
or political achievements as in its general quickness and nascent
adaptability. He clung to this belief, for it was an indispensable neat
block in the structure he was attempting to rear. The New York mind
would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if she would only give it a
chance; for it was thoroughly bright responsive and sympathetic. If she
would only set up by the turn of her hand a blest snug social centre, a
temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ might expand and
where she might inhale its fragrance in the most convenient and luxurious
way, without, as it were, getting up from her chair; if she would only
just try this graceful good-natured experiment—which would make every one
like _her_ so much too—he was sure all the wrinkles in the gilded scroll
of his fate would be smoothed out. But Lady Barb didn’t rise at all to
his conception and hadn’t the least curiosity about the New York mind.
She thought it would be extremely disagreeable to have a lot of people
tumbling in on Sunday evening without being invited; and altogether her
husband’s sketch of the Anglo-American saloon seemed to her to suggest
crude familiarity, high vociferation—she had already made a remark to him
about “screeching women”—and random extravagant laughter. She didn’t
tell him—for this somehow it wasn’t in her power to express, and,
strangely enough, he never completely guessed it—that she was singularly
deficient in any natural or indeed acquired understanding of what a
saloon might be. She had never seen or dreamed of one—and for the most
part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn’t seen. She had seen
great dinners and balls and meets and runs and races; she had seen
garden-parties and bunches of people, mainly women—who, however, didn’t
screech—at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies collected in
splendid castles; but all this gave her no clue to a train of
conversation, to any idea of a social agreement that the interest of
talk, its continuity, its accumulations from season to season, shouldn’t
be lost. Conversation, in Lady Barb’s experience, had never been
continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a bore. It had been
occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were
never explained; it had a dread of detail—it seldom pursued anything very
far or kept hold of it very long.
There was something else she didn’t say to her husband in reference to
his visions of hospitality, which was that if she should open a
saloon—she had taken up the joke as well, for Lady Barb was eminently
good-natured—Mrs. Vanderdecken would straightway open another, and Mrs.
Vanderdecken’s would be the more successful of the two. This lady, for
reasons Lady Barb had not yet explored, passed for the great personage of
New York; there were legends of her husband’s family having behind them a
fabulous antiquity. When this was alluded to it was spoken of as
something incalculable and lost in the dimness of time. Mrs.
Vanderdecken was young, pretty, clever, incredibly pretentious, Lady Barb
thought, and had a wonderfully artistic house. Ambition was expressed,
further, in every rustle of her garments; and if she was the first lady
in America, “bar none”—this had an immense sound—it was plain she
intended to retain the character. It was not till after she had been
several months in New York that Lady Barb began to perceive this easy
mistress of the field, crying out, gracious goodness, before she was
hurt, to have flung down the glove; and when the idea presented itself,
lighted up by an incident I have no space to report, she simply blushed a
little (for Mrs. Vanderdecken) and held her tongue. She hadn’t come to
America to bandy words about “precedence” with such a woman as that. She
had ceased to think of that convenience—of course one was obliged to
think in England; though an instinct of self-preservation, old and
deep-seated, led her not to expose herself to occasions on which her
imputed claim might be tested. This had at bottom much to do with her
having, very soon after the first flush of the honours paid her on her
arrival and which seemed to her rather grossly overdone, taken the line
of scarcely going out. “They can’t keep _that_ up!” she had said to
herself; and in short she would stay, less boringly both for herself and
for others, at home. She had a sense that whenever and wherever she
might go forth she should meet Mrs. Vanderdecken, who would withhold or
deny or contest or even magnanimously concede something—poor Lady Barb
could never imagine what. She didn’t try to, and gave little thought to
all this; for she wasn’t prone to confess to herself fears, especially
fears from which terror was absent. What in the world _had_ Mrs.
Vanderdecken that she, Barbarina Lemon (what a name!), could want? But,
as I have said, it abode within her as a presentiment that if she should
set up a drawing-room in the foreign style (based, that is, on the
suppression of prattling chits and hobbledehoys) this sharp skirmisher
would be beforehand with her. The continuity of conversation, oh that
she would certainly go in for—there was no one so continuous as Mrs.
Vanderdecken. Lady Barb, as I have related, didn’t give her husband the
surprise of confiding to him these thoughts, though she had given him
some other surprises. He would have been decidedly astonished, and
perhaps after a bit a little encouraged, at finding her liable to any
marked form of exasperation.
On the Sunday afternoon she was visible; and at one of these junctures,
going into her drawing-room late, he found her entertaining two ladies
and a gentleman. The gentleman was Sidney Feeder and one of the ladies
none other than Mrs. Vanderdecken, whose ostensible relations with her
were indeed of the most cordial nature. Intending utterly to crush
her—as two or three persons, not perhaps conspicuous for a narrow
accuracy, gave out that she privately declared—Mrs. Vanderdecken yet
wished at least to study the weak points of the invader, to penetrate
herself with the character of the English girl. Lady Barb verily
appeared to have for the representative of the American patriciate a
mysterious fascination. Mrs. Vanderdecken couldn’t take her eyes off her
victim and, whatever might be her estimate of her importance, at least
couldn’t let her alone. “Why does she come to see me?” poor Lady Barb
asked herself. “I’m sure I don’t want to see her; she has done enough
for civility long ago.” Mrs. Vanderdecken had her own reasons, one of
which was simply the pleasure of looking at the Doctor’s wife, as she
habitually called the daughter of the Cantervilles. She wasn’t guilty of
the rashness of depreciating the appearance of so markedly fine a young
woman, but professed a positive unbounded admiration for it, defending it
on many occasions against those of the superficial and stupid who
pronounced her “left nowhere” by the best of the home-grown specimens.
Whatever might have been Lady Barb’s weak points, they included neither
the curve of her cheek and chin, the setting of her head on her throat,
nor the quietness of her deep eyes, which were as beautiful as if they
had been blank, like those of antique busts. “The head’s
enchanting—perfectly enchanting,” Mrs. Vanderdecken used to say
irrelevantly and as if there were only one head in the place. She always
used to ask about the Doctor—which was precisely another reason why she
came. She dragged in the Doctor at every turn, asking if he were often
called up at night; found it the greatest of luxuries, in a word, to
address Lady Barb as the wife of a medical man and as more or less _au
courant_ of her husband’s patients. The other lady, on this Sunday
afternoon, was a certain little Mrs. Chew, who had the appearance of a
small but very expensive doll and was always asking Lady Barb about
England, which Mrs. Vanderdecken never did. The latter discoursed on a
purely American basis and with that continuity of which mention has
already been made, while Mrs. Chew engaged Sidney Feeder on topics
equally local. Lady Barb liked Sidney Feeder; she only hated his name,
which was constantly in her ears during the half-hour the ladies sat with
her, Mrs. Chew having, like so many persons in New York, the habit, which
greatly annoyed her, of re-apostrophising and re-designating every one
present.
Lady Barb’s relations with Mrs. Vanderdecken consisted mainly in
wondering, while she talked, what she wanted of her, and in looking, with
her sculptured eyes, at her visitor’s clothes, in which there was always
much to examine. “Oh Doctor Feeder!” “Now Doctor Feeder!” “Well Doctor
Feeder”—these exclamations, on Mrs. Chew’s lips, were an undertone in
Lady Barb’s consciousness. When we say she liked her husband’s confrère,
as he never failed to describe himself, we understand that she smiled on
his appearance and gave him her hand, and asked him if he would have tea.
There was nothing nasty, as they so analytically said in London, about
Lady Barb, and she would have been incapable of inflicting a deliberate
snub on a man who had the air of standing up so squarely to any purpose
he might have in hand. But she had nothing of her own at all to say to
Sidney Feeder. He apparently had the art of making her shy, more shy
than usual—since she was always a little so; she discouraged him,
discouraged him completely and reduced him to naught. He wasn’t a man
who wanted drawing out, there was nothing of that in him, he was
remarkably copious; but she seemed unable to follow him in any direction
and half the time evidently didn’t know what he was saying. He tried to
adapt his conversation to her needs; but when he spoke of the world, of
what was going on in society, she was more at sea even than when he spoke
of hospitals and laboratories and the health of the city and the progress
of science. She appeared indeed after her first smile when he came in,
which was always charming, scarcely to see him—looking past him and above
him and below him, everywhere but at him, till he rose to go again, when
she gave him another smile, as expressive of pleasure and of casual
acquaintance as that with which she had greeted his entry: it seemed to
imply that they had been having delightful communion. He wondered what
the deuce Jackson Lemon could find interesting in such a woman, and he
believed his perverse, though gifted, colleague not destined to feel her
in the long run enrich or illuminate his life. He pitied Jackson, he saw
that Lady Barb, in New York, would neither assimilate nor be assimilated;
and yet he was afraid, for very compassion, to betray to the poor man how
the queer step he had taken—now so dreadfully irrevocable—might be going
to strike most others. Sidney Feeder was a man of a strenuous
conscience, who did loyal duty overmuch and from the very fear he
mightn’t do it enough. In order not to appear to he called upon Lady
Barb heroically, in spite of pressing engagements and week after week,
enjoying his virtue himself as little as he made it fruitful for his
hostess, who wondered at last what she had done to deserve this extremity
of appreciation.
She spoke of it to her husband, who wondered also what poor Sidney had in
his head and yet naturally shrank from damping too brutally his zeal.
Between the latter’s wish not to let Jackson see his marriage had made a
difference and Jackson’s hesitation to reveal to him that his standard of
friendship was too high, Lady Barb passed a good many of those numerous
hours during which she asked herself if they were the “sort of thing” she
had come to America for. Very little had ever passed between her and her
husband on the subject of the most regular of her bores, a clear instinct
warning her that if they were ever to have scenes she must choose the
occasion well, and this odd person not being an occasion. Jackson had
tacitly admitted that his “confrère” was anything she chose to think him;
he was not a man to be guilty in a discussion of the disloyalty of
damning a real friend with praise that was faint. If Lady Agatha had
been less of an absentee from her sister’s fireside, meanwhile, Doctor
Feeder would have been better entertained; for the younger of the English
pair prided herself, after several months of New York, on understanding
everything that was said, on interpreting every sound, no matter from
what lips the monstrous mystery fell. But Lady Agatha was never at home;
she had learned to describe herself perfectly by the time she wrote her
mother that she was always on the go. None of the innumerable victims of
old-world tyranny welcomed to the land of freedom had yet offered more
lavish incense to that goddess than this emancipated London debutante.
She had enrolled herself in an amiable band known by the humorous name of
“the Tearers”—a dozen young ladies of agreeable appearance, high spirits
and good wind, whose most general characteristic was that, when wanted,
they were to be sought anywhere in the world but under the roof supposed
to shelter them. They browsed far from the fold; and when Sidney Feeder,
as sometimes happened, met Lady Agatha at other houses, she was in the
hands of the irrepressible Longstraw. She had come back to her sister,
but Mr. Longstraw had followed her to the door. As to passing it, he had
received direct discouragement from her brother-in-law; but he could at
least hang about and wait for her. It may be confided to the reader at
the risk of discounting the effect of the only passage in this very level
narrative formed to startle that he never had to wait very long.
When Jackson Lemon came in his wife’s visitors were on the point of
leaving her; and he didn’t even ask his colleague to remain, for he had
something particular to say to Lady Barb.
“I haven’t put to you half the questions I wanted—I’ve been talking so
much to Doctor Feeder,” the dressy Mrs. Chew said, holding the hand of
her hostess in one of her own and toying at one of Lady Barb’s ribbons
with the other.
“I don’t think I’ve anything to tell you; I think I’ve told people
everything,” Lady Barb answered rather wearily.
“You haven’t told _me_ much!” Mrs. Vanderdecken richly radiated.
“What could one tell you? You know everything,” Jackson impatiently
laughed.
“Ah no—there are some things that are great mysteries for me!” this
visitor promptly pronounced. “I hope you’re coming to me on the
seventeenth,” she added to Lady Barb.
“On the seventeenth? I believe we go somewhere.”
“Do go to Mrs. Vanderdecken’s,” said Mrs. Chew; “you’ll see the cream of
the cream.”
“Oh gracious!” Mrs. Vanderdecken vaguely cried.
“Well, I don’t care; she will, won’t she, Doctor Feeder?—the very pick of
American society.” Mrs. Chew stuck to her point.
“Oh I’ve no doubt Lady Barb will have a good time,” said Sidney Feeder.
“I’m afraid you miss the bran,” he went on with irrelevant jocosity to
Jackson’s bride. He always tried the jocose when other elements had
failed.
“The bran?” Jackson’s bride couldn’t think.
“Where you used to ride—in the Park.”
“My dear fellow, you speak as if we had met at the circus,” her husband
interposed. “I haven’t married a mountebank!”
“Well, they put some stuff on the road,” Sidney Feeder explained, not
holding much to his joke.
“You must miss a great many things,” said Mrs. Chew tenderly.
“I don’t see what,” Mrs. Vanderdecken tinkled, “except the fogs and the
Queen. New York’s getting more and more like London. It’s a pity—you
ought to have known us thirty years ago.”
“_You’re_ the queen here,” said Jackson Lemon, “but I don’t know what you
know about thirty years ago.”
“Do you think she doesn’t go back?—she goes back to the last century!”
cried Mrs. Chew.
“I daresay I should have liked that,” said Lady Barb; “but I can’t
imagine.” And she looked at her husband—a look she often had—as if she
vaguely wished him to do something.
He was not called upon, however, to take any violent steps, for Mrs. Chew
presently said, “Well, Lady Barb, good-bye”; Mrs. Vanderdecken glared
genially and as for excess of meaning at her hostess and addressed a
farewell, accompanied very audibly with his title, to her host; and
Sidney Feeder made a joke about stepping on the trains of the ladies’
dresses as he accompanied them to the door. Mrs. Chew had always a great
deal to say at the last; she talked till she was in the street and then
she addressed that prospect. But at the end of five minutes Jackson
Lemon was alone with his wife, to whom he then announced a piece of news.
He prefaced it, however, by an inquiry as he came back from the hall.
“Where’s Agatha, my dear?”
“I haven’t the least idea. In the streets somewhere, I suppose.”
“I think you ought to know a little more.”
“How can I know about things here? I’ve given her up. I can do nothing
with her. I don’t care what she does.”
“She ought to go back to England,” Jackson said after a pause.
“She ought never to have come.”
“It was not my proposal, God knows!” he sharply returned.
“Mamma could never know what it really is,” his wife more quietly noted.
“No, it hasn’t been as yet what your mother supposed! The man Longstraw
wants to marry her and has made a formal proposal. I met him half an
hour ago in Madison Avenue, and he asked me to come with him into the
Columbia Club. There, in the billiard-room, which to-day is empty, he
opened himself—thinking evidently that in laying the matter before me he
was behaving with extraordinary propriety. He tells me he’s dying of
love and that she’s perfectly willing to go and live in Arizona.”
“So she is,” said Lady Barb. “And what did you tell him?”
“I told him I was convinced it would never do and that at any rate I
could have nothing to say to it. I told him explicitly in short what I
had told him virtually before. I said we should send Aggie straight back
to England, and that if they had the courage they must themselves broach
the question over there.”
“When shall you send her back?” asked Lady Barb.
“Immediately—by the very first steamer.”
“Alone, like an American girl?”
“Don’t be rough, Barb,” Jackson replied. “I shall easily find some
people—lots of them are sailing now.”
“I must take her myself,” Lady Barb observed in a moment. “I brought her
out—so I must restore her to my mother’s hands.”
He had expected this and believed he was prepared for it, but when it
came he found his preparation not complete. He had no answer to
make—none at least that seemed to him to go to the point. During these
last weeks it had come over him with a quiet irresistible unmerciful
force that Mrs. Dexter Freer had been right in saying to him that Sunday
afternoon in Jermyn Street, the summer before, that he would find it
wasn’t so simple to be an American. Such a character was complicated in
just the measure that she had foretold by the difficulty of domesticating
any wife at all liberally chosen. The difficulty wasn’t dissipated by
his having taken a high tone about it; it pinched him from morning till
night, it hurt him like a misfitting shoe. His high tone had given him
courage when he took the great step; but he began to perceive that the
highest tone in the world couldn’t change the nature of things. His ears
tingled as he inwardly noted that if the Dexter Freers, whom he had
thought alike abject in their hopes and their fears, had been by ill luck
spending the winter in New York, they would have found his predicament as
good fun as they could wish. Drop by drop the conviction had entered his
mind—the first drop had come in the form of a word from Lady Agatha—that
if his wife should return to England she would never again later recross
the Atlantic. That word from the competent source had been the touch
from the outside at which often a man’s fear crystallises. What she
would do, how she would resist—this he wasn’t yet prepared to tell
himself; but he felt every time he looked at her that the beautiful woman
he had adored was filled with a dumb insuperable ineradicable purpose.
He knew that if she should plant herself firm no power on earth would
move her; and her blooming antique beauty and the general loftiness of
her breeding came fast to seem to him but the magnificent expression of a
dense patient ponderous power to resist. She wasn’t light, she wasn’t
supple, and after six months of marriage he had made up his mind that she
wasn’t intelligent—in spite of all which she would elude him. She had
married him, she had come into his fortune and his consideration—for who
was she after all? he was on occasion so angry as to ask himself,
remembering that in England Lady Claras and Lady Florences were as thick
as blackberries—but she would have nothing to do, if she could help it,
with his country. She had gone in to dinner first in every house in the
place, but this hadn’t satisfied her. It _had_ been simple to be an
American in the good and easy sense that no one else in New York had made
any difficulties; the difficulties had sprung from the very, the
consummate, make of her, which were after all what he had married her
for, thinking they would be a fine temperamental heritage for his brood.
So they would, doubtless, in the coming years and after the brood should
have appeared; but meanwhile they interfered with the best heritage of
all—the nationality of his possible children. She would do indeed
nothing violent; he was tolerably certain of that. She wouldn’t return
to England without his consent; only when she should return it would be
once for all. His one possible line, then, was not to take her back—a
position replete with difficulties, since he had in a manner given his
word; she herself giving none at all beyond the formal promise murmured
at the altar. She had been general, but he had been specific; the
settlements he had made were a part of that. His difficulties were such
as he couldn’t directly face. He must tack in approaching so uncertain a
coast. He said to his wife presently that it would be very inconvenient
for him to leave New York at that moment: she must remember their plans
had been laid for a later move. He couldn’t think of letting her make
the voyage without him, and on the other hand they must pack her sister
off without delay. He would therefore make instant inquiry for a
chaperon, and he relieved his irritation by cursing the name and every
other attribute of Herman Longstraw.
Lady Barb didn’t trouble herself to denounce this gentleman; her manner
was that of having for a long time expected the worst. She simply
remarked after having listened to her husband for some minutes in
silence: “I’d quite as lief she should marry Doctor Feeder!”
The day after this he closeted himself for an hour with his
sister-in-law, taking great pains to set forth to her the reasons why she
shouldn’t marry her Californian. Jackson was kind, he was affectionate;
he kissed her and put his arm round her waist, he reminded her that he
and she were the best of friends and that she had always been awfully
nice to him: therefore he counted on her. She’d break her mother’s
heart, she’d deserve her father’s curse, and she’d get him, Jackson, into
a pickle from which no human power might ever disembroil him. Lady
Agatha listened and cried, she returned his kiss very affectionately and
admitted that her father and mother would never consent to such a
marriage; and when he told her that he had made arrangements that she
should sail for Liverpool, with some charming people, the next day but
one, she embraced him again and assured him she could never thank him
enough for all the trouble he had taken about her. He flattered himself
he had convinced and in some degree comforted her, and he reflected with
complacency that even should his wife take it into her head Barb would
never get ready to embark for her native land between a Monday and a
Wednesday. The next morning Lady Agatha failed to appear at breakfast,
though as she usually rose very late her absence excited no immediate
alarm. She hadn’t rung her bell and was supposed still to be sleeping.
But she had never yet slept later than mid-day; and as this hour
approached her sister went to her room. Lady Barb then discovered that
she had left the house at seven o’clock in the morning and had gone to
meet Mr. Longstraw at a neighbouring corner. A little note on the table
explained it very succinctly, and put beyond the power of the Jackson
Lemons to doubt that by the time this news reached them their wayward
sister had been united to the man of her preference as closely as the
laws of the State of New York could bind her. Her little note set forth
that as she knew she should never be permitted to marry him she had
resolved to marry him without permission, and that directly after the
ceremony, which would be of the simplest kind, they were to take a train
for the Far West.
Our record is concerned only with the remote consequences of this affair,
which made of course a great deal of trouble for poor Jackson. He
pursued the fugitives to remote rocky fastnesses and finally overtook
them in California; but he hadn’t the boldness to propose to them to
separate, for he promptly made out that Herman Longstraw was at least as
well married as himself. Lady Agatha was already popular in the new
States, where the history of her elopement, emblazoned in enormous
capitals, was circulated in a thousand newspapers. This question of the
newspapers had been for our troubled friend one of the most definite
results of his sister-in-law’s _coup de tête_. His first thought had
been of the public prints and his first exclamation a prayer that they
shouldn’t get hold of the story. They had, however, got hold of it with
a myriad wildly-waved hands and were scattering it broadcast over the
world. Lady Barb never caught them in the act—she succeeded perfectly in
not seeing what she needn’t; but an affectionate friend of the family,
travelling at that time in the United States, made a parcel of some of
the leading journals, and sent them to Lord Canterville. This missive
elicited from her ladyship a letter, addressed to her son-in-law, which
shook the young man’s position to the base. The phials of a rank
vulgarity had been opened on the house of Canterville, and the noble
matron demanded that in compensation for the affronts and injuries heaped
upon her family, and bereaved and dishonoured as she was, she should at
least be allowed to look on the face of her second daughter. “I suppose
you’ll not, for very pity, be deaf to such a prayer as that,” said Lady
Barb; and though loth to record a second act of weakness on the part of a
man with pretensions to be strong, I may not disguise the fact that poor
Jackson, who blushed dreadfully over the newspapers and felt afresh as he
read them the force of Mrs. Freer’s terrible axiom, poor Jackson paid a
visit to the office of the Cunarders. He said to himself later on that
it was the newspapers that had done it; he couldn’t decently appear to be
on their side: they made it so hard to deny that the country was
impossible at a time when one was in need of all one’s arguments. Lady
Barb, before sailing, definitely refused to mention any week or month as
the date of their prearranged return to New York. Very many weeks and
months have elapsed since then, and she gives no sign of coming back.
She will never fix a date. She is much missed by Mrs. Vanderdecken, who
still alludes to her—still says the line of the shoulders was superb;
putting the statement pensively in the past tense. Lady Beauchemin and
Lady Marmaduke are much disconcerted; the international project has not,
in their view, received an impetus.
Jackson Lemon has a house in London and he rides in the Park with his
wife, who is as beautiful as the day and who a year ago presented him
with a little girl exhibiting features that he already scans for the look
of race—whether in hope or in fear to-day is more than my muse has
revealed. He has occasional scenes with Lady Barb during which the look
of race is very clear in her own countenance; but they never terminate in
a visit to the Cunarders. He’s exceedingly restless and is constantly
crossing to the Continent; but he returns with a certain abruptness, for
he hates meeting the Dexter Freers, who seem to pervade the more
comfortable parts of Europe. He dodges them in every town. Sidney
Feeder feels very badly about him; it’s months since Jackson has sent him
any “results.” The excellent fellow goes very often, in a consolatory
spirit, to see Mrs. Lemon, but has not yet been able to answer her
standing question—“Why that girl more than another?” Lady Agatha
Longstraw and her husband arrived a year ago in England, and Mr.
Longstraw’s personality had immense success during the last London
season. It’s not exactly known what they live on, though perfectly known
that he’s looking for something to do. Meanwhile it’s as good as known
that their really quite responsible brother-in-law supports them.