s puzzling. Are there any Generals?"
"Men in hats and feathers?"
"Of course not. No. I suppose they are the men who control the great
public businesses. Who is that distinguished looking man?"
"That? He's a most important officer. That is Morden. He is managing
director of the Antibilious Pill Company. I have heard that his workers
sometimes turn out a myriad myriad pills a day in the twenty-four hours.
Fancy a myriad myriad!"
"A myriad myriad. No wonder he looks proud," said Graham. "Pills! What a
wonderful time it is! That man in purple?"
"He is not quite one of the inner circle, you know. But we like him. He
is really clever and very amusing. He is one of the heads of the
Medical Faculty of our London University. All medical men, you know, are
shareholders in the Medical Faculty Company, and wear that purple. You
have to be--to be qualified. But of course, people who are paid by fees
for doing something--" She smiled away the social pretensions of all
such people.
"Are any of your great artists or authors here?"
"No authors. They are mostly such queer people--and so preoccupied about
themselves. And they quarrel so dreadfully! They will fight, some of
them, for precedence on staircases! Dreadful isn't it? But I think
Wraysbury, the fashionable capillotomist, is here. From Capri."
"Capillotomist," said Graham. "Ah! I remember. An artist! Why not?"
"We have to cultivate him," she said apologetically. "Our heads are in
his hands." She smiled.
Graham hesitated at the invited compliment, but his glance was
expressive. "Have the arts grown with the rest of civilised things?" he
said. "Who are your great painters?"
She looked at him doubtfully. Then laughed. "For a moment," she said, "I
thought you meant--" She laughed again. "You mean, of course, those good
men you used to think so much of because they could cover great spaces
of canvas with oil-colours? Great oblongs. And people used to put the
things in gilt frames and hang them up in rows in their square rooms. We
haven't any. People grew tired of that sort of thing."
"But what did you think I meant?"
She put a finger significantly on a cheek whose glow was above
suspicion, and smiled and looked very arch and pretty and inviting. "And
here," and she indicated her eyelid.
Graham had an adventurous moment. Then a grotesque memory of a picture
he had somewhere seen of Uncle Toby and the Widow flashed across his
mind. An archaic shame came upo
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