"Г.К.Честертон. The Club of Queer Trades " - читать интересную книгу автора

greatly enjoying the intellectual banquet within.

"I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond," said
Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, "even if you only remember him as
a schoolboy."

"Perfectly," said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly
and respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to
Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, he said:

"I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not
going yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of
you."

The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of
obeisance and a vague utterance of, "If Lady Beaumont . . . a lady,
of course," he followed the young man back into the salon. He had
scarcely been deposited there half a minute before another peal of
laughter told that he had (in all probability) been scored off
again.

"Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh," said Beaumont,
as he helped us off with our coats. "He has not the modern mind."

"What is the modern mind?" asked Grant.

"Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive--and faces the
facts of life seriously." At this moment another roar of laughter
came from within.

"I only ask," said Basil, "because of the last two friends of yours
who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the
other thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way, if
I remember right."

"Do you know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I can
never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so
liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?"

"No," said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
drawing-room.

This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away
from our slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time
that afternoon. Two people, however, still looked at him. One was
the daughter of the house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with
great violet eyes and with the intense and awful thirst of the
female upper class for verbal amusement and stimulus. The other