"That's just where I want your advice," said Loveland, who had come a long way to get it. For the distance from London to the north of Scotland is formidable when birds are out of season.
Lady Loveland was flattered that Val should ask for her advice which, when offered gratuitously, he had never been known to take.
"My advice!" she echoed sadly. "That's all I can give you now! Although I did hope, dear Boy, I must confess. I--I have been trying for Limericks. It was for your sake, and I hoped to win large sums. I thought of lines all night long, and I did send in some splendid ones, a thousand times better than those for which other people (dreadful people, my dear, with names like Hogson, and Dobbs) have won hundreds of pounds. I gave the editors permission to _use my name_, too; one would have thought, a valuable advertisement for their papers. But all I've won after the greatest efforts has been fifteen and six--an insult--while these Dobbs and Hogsons--I believe the editors must be _Socialists_. And--the shillings for the postal orders have counted up into pounds. I am crushed with remorse."
"Never mind, dear, you meant it for the best," said Val, who cared more for his mother than for anyone else in the world--except himself. And that he made this exception was largely Lady Loveland's fault, for she had brought him up to believe in but one person of paramount importance, adorning the universe: Perceval George Victor Edward Gordon, thirteenth Marquis of Loveland. "What would a few pounds matter--or a few hundreds even, if you'd won them? The ship's too far under water to be raised with Limericks."
"It's as bad as anything can be. Look out of your window at the snow falling. Well, that's nothing to the way it's snowing bills outside my window. If you and I can't think of something to clear the weather, I shall have to chuck the army. And even if I do, the bills will still keep on snowing."
"What horrible creatures tradesmen must be," said Lady Loveland, whose opinions had come down to her crusted and spider-webbed from the cellars of the Stone Age. "To think that we'd have had power of life and death over them if we'd lived a few hundred years ago. I wish those times could come back."