“I suppose they’ve sent for Lady Levy,” said Lord Peter.
“I suppose so,” agreed the other. “I’d better pop round and express sympathy or somethin’, what? Wouldn’t look well not to, d’you think? But it’s deuced awkward. What am I to say?”
“I don’t think it matters much what you say,” said Lord Peter, helpfully. “I should ask if you can do anything.”
“Thanks,” said the lover, “I will. Energetic young man. Count on me. Always at your service. Ring me up any time of the day or night. That’s the line to take, don’t you think?”
Mr. John P. Milligan, the London representative of the great Milligan railroad and shipping company, was dictating code cables to his secretary in an office in Lombard Street, when a card was brought up to him, bearing the simple legend:
Mr. Milligan was annoyed at the interruption, but, like many of his nation, if he had a weak point, it was the British aristocracy. He postponed for a few minutes the elimination from the map of a modest but promising farm, and directed that the visitor should be shown up.
“Good-afternoon,” said that nobleman, ambling genially in, “it’s most uncommonly good of you to let me come round wastin’ your time like this. I’ll try not to be too long about it, though I’m not awfully good at comin’ to the point. My brother never would let me stand for the county, y’know—said I wandered on so nobody’d know what I was talkin’ about.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lord Wimsey,” said Mr. Milligan. “Won’t you take a seat?”
“Thanks,” said Lord Peter, “but I’m not a peer, you know—that’s my brother Denver. My name’s Peter. It’s a silly name, I always think, so old-world and full of homely virtue and that sort of thing, but my godfathers and godmothers in my baptism are responsible for that, I suppose, officially—which is rather hard on them, you know, as they didn’t actually choose it. But we always have a Peter, after the third duke, who betrayed five kings somewhere about the Wars of the Roses, though come to think of it, it ain’t anything to be proud of. Still, one has to make the best of it.”
Mr. Milligan, thus ingeniously placed at that disadvantage which attends ignorance, manoeuvred for position, and offered his interrupter a Corona Corona.