A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in,
squeezing his way along the narrow passage between the
tall rows of books, to the small open space at the end.
His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a high desk.
She did not look up.
"Well--I visited his Lordship all right." He announced
his presence thus genially.
"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked,
turning to him, after a pause, her emotionless, plain face.
"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity.
"You should have seen the way they took to me.
It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe' there, all over
the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself
at breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer
than silk. Oh, it's clear as daylight--I was intended
for a fashionable career."
She smiled in a faint, passive way. "Well--they say
'better late than never,' you know." "And after all,
IS it so very late?" he said, adopting her phrase as an
expression of his thought. "I'm just turned forty, and I
feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger
than the first Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer?
Why he didn't even get into the House of Commons until
he was seven-and-forty."
"You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,"
she commented.
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