“My precious” was equally charming in his Eton days, when his sleepy green eyes looked up at you from under a lock of fair silky hair that was never to be kept within regulation School bounds, but continually strayed upon the fair, if freckled, expanse of a brow which might have been the home of a pure and innocent mind, and probably was not. He had a pleasant treble boy’s voice and a beautiful smile, particularly when his mother told him he might smoke just one cigarette, of her own special brand, as a great treat.
“Mother’s are hay,” he said afterwards in confidence, and added that he preferred cut Cavendish, and that the best way to induce a meerschaum to color was to smoke it foul, and never to remove the dottle. But Lady Garlingham was never the wiser. She had the utmost faith in her boy.
“Gar will be a dab at Classics,” she said with pride. “Fancy his knowing that Dido was a heathen goddess, and Procrustes was a Grecian King who murdered his mother and afterwards put out his own eyes! I must really give his tutor a hint not to bring him on _too_ fast. He will have to make his own way in the world, poor dear, that is certain; but I don’t want him to turn out a literary genius with eccentric clothes, or anything in the scientific line that isn’t careful about its nails and doesn’t comb its hair.”
Garlingham’s clothes are always of the latest fashion and in the most admirable taste. His hair is as well groomed, his hands are as immaculate as any mother’s heart could desire, and he has not turned out a genius. During his career at Oxford he did not allow his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of athletic distinction. He left the University unburdened with honors, carrying in his wake a string of bills as long as a kite’s tail. Relieved of this by the sacrifice of some of Lady Garlingham’s diamonds, the kite shot up into the empyrean in the wake of a dazzling star of the comic-opera stage.
“But, thank Heaven, the boy has principles,” breathed Lady Garlingham. “He never dreamed of marrying her!”
Garlingham descended from the skies ere long, tangled in a telegraphic wire, and went into the Diplomatic Service. He became fourth under-secretary at an Imperial foreign Embassy, in virtue of the marriage of his maternal aunt with Prince John Schulenstorff-Wangelbrode (who was Military Attaché in the days of the pannier and the polonaise, the bustle and the fringed whip-parasol). I have not the least idea in what Garlingham’s duties consisted, and the dear fellow was diplomatically reticent when sounded on the subject; but of one thing I am sure, that few young men have worn an official button and lapels with greater ease and distinction. He quite adored his mother, and made her his _confidante_ in all his love affairs. Indeed I believe Lady Garlingham kept a little register of these at one time on the sticks of an ivory fan—those that were going off, those that were in full bloom, and those that were just coming on; and posted up dates and set down names with the utmost regularity.