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"Gregory will take her in," said Betty; "and we'll put Bertram Fraser on her other side. He's always delightful. And we'll have the Canning-Thompsons and the Overtons and the Byngs; the Byngs are so decorative!" Constance Armytage was now Mrs. Byng.
My chaise companion was a man very well known in 'Society'; and though not remarkably popular, was not altogether undistinguished, as the following little tale will attest. Frederick Byng, one of the Torrington branch of the Byngs, was chiefly famous for his sobriquet 'The Poodle'; this he owed to no special merit of his own, but simply to the accident of his thick curly head of hair.
You don't know the mater, so it doesn't matter to you if she rolls around and puts the Curse of the Byngs on you, and all that sort of thing. Besides, I don't know." Reggie mused. "Of course, this is the happiest day of my life," he proceeded, "and I'm not saying it isn't, but you know how it is there's absolutely no doubt that a chappie does not show at his best when he's being married.
All, of course, were flattering the Miss Falconers, and abusing their absent friends, those especially who were expected to bear a part in this concert; for instance "Those two eternal Miss Byngs, with voices, like cracked bells, and with their old-fashioned music, Handel, Corelli, and Pergolese, horrid! And odious little Miss Crotch, who has science but no taste, execution but no expression!"
Karen was still, touchingly so to her husband's eyes, the little Hans Andersen heroine in appearance. She wore to-night the white silk dress and the wreath of little white roses. Oliver and Gregory chatted desultorily until the Byngs arrived. Oliver was fair and ruddy and his air of dozing contentment was always vexatious to his younger brother. He had every reason for contentment.
But lots of this country here has five or six hundred-year-old families still flourishing. That's why Essex is so much more genuinely Old England than Surrey, say, or Kent. Round here you'll find Corners and Fairlies, and then you get Capels, and then away down towards Dunmow and Braintree Maynards and Byngs.
Gregory grew a little out of temper after talking for five minutes to Oliver and this was not a fortunate mood in which to realise, as the Montgomerys, the Overtons and the Canning-Thompsons followed the Byngs, at eight-fifteen, that Madame von Marwitz was probably going to be late.
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