The boy married a daughter of
Lord Pinwells. I know them too. The collecting mania tends to run in
families. This chap collects buckles--men's shoe-buckles they must be,
in use between the years 1580 and 1660; the dates mayn't be right, but
fact's as I say. Your true collector always has some unaccountable
fad of that kind. On other points he's as level-headed as a breeder of
shorthorns, which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you
probably know, have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for
instance--" he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering his
move,--"Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people with
big front teeth. I've heard her shout across a table, 'Keep your mouth
shut, Miss Smith; they're as yellow as carrots!' across a table, mind
you. To me she's always been civility itself. She dabbles in literature,
likes to collect a few of us in her drawing-room, but mention a
clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself, and she gobbles
like a turkey-cock. I've been told it's a family feud--something to do
with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the First. Yes," he continued,
suffering check after check, "I always like to know something of the
grandmothers of our fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve
all that we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage, in the
majority of cases, that they are personally clean.
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