"With your daughter, yes."
Et moi donc! thought this lady, who, like others of our aristocracy,
occasionally lapsed into French. But she said: "Why not enter the
lists?"
"I thought they were closed."
"Are they ever?"
But now Verelst addressed the too charming young man. "How is your
father?"
"In his usual poor health, thank you."
"What does he say about the war?"
"Nothing very original--that the Kaiser ought to be sent to Devil's
Island. But that I told him would be an insult to Dreyfus, who was
insulted enough. The proper place for the beast is the zoo. At the same
time, the fellow is only a pawn. The blame rests on Rome--rests on her
seven hills."
Verelst drew back. In the great days, or more exactly in the great
nights, he had been a pal of M. P. That palship he had no intention of
extending to M. P.'s son, and it was indifferently that he asked: "In
what way?"
Kate Schermerhorn, who had been talking to Margaret and to Lennox,
turned. Lennox also had turned. Paliser had the floor, or rather the
table. He made short work of it.
"It was Caesar's policy to create a solitude and call it peace. That
policy Rome abandoned. Otherwise, that is if she had continued to turn
the barbarians into so many dead flies, their legs in the air, there
would be no barbarian now on the throne of Prussia. There would be no
Prussia, no throne, no war."
You ought to write for the comic papers, thought Verelst, who said:
"Well, there is one comfort. It can't last forever."
With feigned sympathy Mrs. Austen took it up. "Ah, yes, but meanwhile
there is that poor Belgium!"
"By the way," Paliser threw in. "I have a box or two for the Relief Fund
at the Splendor to-night. Would anybody care to go?"
Kate Schermerhorn, who looked like a wayward angel, exclaimed at it:
"Oh, do let's. There's to be a duck of a medium and I am just dying to
have my fortune told."
Verelst showed his handsome false teeth. "No need of a medium for that,
my dear. Your path is one of destruction. You will bowl men over as you
go."