Lord Foxbridge Butts In Read Online Free PDF Page B

then?”
    “Your lordship cannot go far wrong at Poole’s, who served my former employer, though perhaps Anderson & Sheppard would better befit your lordship’s youth,” he told me, clearly relieved.
    “Very well, thank you, Pond,” I smiled at him to show no hard feelings, took a last satisfied look in the glass and headed into the sitting-room, “I’ll be lunching downstairs, then, and off to the Row after.”
    “Very good, my lord,” he trailed after me, swiping at my back with his brush.
    “Where do you eat, Pond?” I wondered.
    “Guests’ retainers are made very welcome in the kitchens and staff rooms, my lord,” he told me, unperturbed by my inane questions, which I suppose were rather easier to stomach than my other eccentricities, “And I take a pub lunch on my afternoons off.”
    “Do they do good lunches here?” I almost asked him which pubs he went to, but guessed that I’d be trampling yet another sacred boundary if I did; being valeted was more fraught with pitfalls of etiquette than I’d ever imagined.
    “The fare is most satisfactory, my lord,” he answered.
    “Good, good,” I smiled, “I’ll see you later, then.”
    The public dining room was only nominally public — so-called to distinguish it from the small dining room in back where one could hold parties — since the only people who ate there were the hotel guests, and sometimes their friends. The room was lovely, though, the walls oak-paneled up to eye level and painted the rest of the way in a soothing butter yellow, topped by an elaborate ceiling alive with plaster cornucopias spewing plaster produce in every direction; several small tables for two were dotted about, with a few larger tables for four or six standing proudly in the center; there were two tall windows as well as big glass doors opening into the winter-garden, which was full of nodding palms and twittering birds and splashing fountains.
    The food was rather Frenchified, arranged artistically on separate plates and carried out on trays, instead of the usual club lunch where the carver goes about with a cart so one can choose one’s cut, and the waiter serves the rest of the food from another cart. But under the pompous names and fanciful garnishes, it was actually good plain fare, pork cutlets with turnips and peas, preceded by mushroom soup and followed by a strawberry trifle.
    Thus fortified, I swallowed a spot of port and set out in a cab to buy suits. The visit to Anderson & Sheppard was a great deal of fun, being fawned over and shown fabrics and buttons and sketches, stripped to my shirt and shorts so I could be measured all over, and making a sensation by bespeaking a dozen suits at fifty guineas a throw. I continued up and down Savile Row, ordering two dozen silk shirts in one place and a hundred silk handkerchiefs in another, sitting for an hour trying on hats, having my feet measured with calipers for shoes, examining clocked socks and considering avant-garde neckties.
    By the time I turned my steps toward home, I’d spent so much money that the Count’s hundred pounds seemed a pittance in comparison. I stopped into an anonymous little tea-shop just outside the Burlington Arcade (I love tea in the afternoons, just not the mornings), where I restored myself with cucumber sandwiches and a sugared orange, surrounded by elderly females who twittered like starlings disturbed from their tree the whole time I was there.
    I had another bath when I got back to the Hyacinth, as shopping in the summer is rather hot work, and I wanted to be fresh for the evening: I was invited to Lady Paxton’s great ball, the first of the high holy days of the Season; I was rather looking forward to it, while at the same time rather dreading it.
    The thing with Society balls is that, while affording the opportunity to meet new people and catch up on old acquaintances, and giving one an excuse to dance and to look well in white tie (both of which I enjoyed immensely), there was