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Updated: May 25, 2025
It was not yet easy to realize that, until the success of his play six thousand pounds sterling in eight calendar months a new book had been an event. . . . For a happy hour he arranged and rearranged. At the end, surveying his handiwork with undisguised pleasure, he thought of the bizarre night when Babs Neave had forced her way in. He could still hardly believe that it had occurred.
Yes I shall always be glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was the coup de foudre. I could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other things.
The drive home was a blank until he was galvanized by her leaning through the window and directing the coachman to Ryder Street. Thereafter facts gave place to emotions, and the other emotions to an incredulous elation that Barbara Neave should have thrown herself at his feet.
It amused me at the time the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of Daunt's belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor. And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness I'd never heard in him: "Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having those things to handle!
The sale was a slaughter and when I saw the Daunt Diana fall at the wink of a little third-rate brocanteur from Vienna I turned sick at the folly of my kind. For my part, I had never believed that Neave had sold the collection because he'd "found it out"; and within a year my incredulity was justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were known for the marvels they are.
Down, down went the little old spider, and then, to his horror, old Mr. Neave saw him slip past the dining-room and make for the porch, the dark drive, the carriage gates, the office. Stop him, stop him, somebody! Old Mr. Neave started up. It was dark in his dressing-room; the window shone pale. How long had he been asleep?
"You're tired again," said Charlotte reproachfully, and she stopped the rocker and offered her warm plum-like cheek. Bright-haired Ethel pecked his beard, Marion's lips brushed his ear. "Did you walk back, father?" asked Charlotte. "Yes, I walked home," said old Mr. Neave, and he sank into one of the immense drawing-room chairs. "But why didn't you take a cab?" said Ethel.
Neave, pushing the cigar box across the smoking-room table, had listened to praises of his wife, his girls, of himself even. "You're an ideal family, sir, an ideal family. It's like something one reads about or sees on the stage." "That's all right, my boy," old Mr. Neave would reply. "Try one of those; I think you'll like them.
Sonia Dainton that was? H'm," said Sybil. "And Lady Barbara Neave. Are you being taken up by that set now, Ricky?" "I don't quite know what you mean by 'being taken up. I met them at dinner. . . . And I lunched with the Crawleighs to-day," he added without filling in the intervening encounters.
J. Bidlake, of Plymouth; Joseph Storrs, of Chesterfield; William Fothergill, of Carr End, Yorkshire; J. Seymour, of Coventry; Moses Neave, of Poole; Joseph Taylor, of Scarborough; Timothy Clark, of Doncaster; Thomas Davis, of Milverton; George Croker Fox, of Falmouth; Benjamin Grubb, of Clonmell in Ireland; Sir William Forbes, of Edinburgh; the Rev.
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