Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair

Robert, eyeing him over the receiver, wondered for the hundredth time what was going to become of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet when it at last slipped from his good Blair grasp into the hands of this young sprig of the Bennets. That the boy had brains he knew, but brains wouldn’t take him far in Milford. Milford expected a man to stop being undergraduate when he reached graduate age. But there was no sign of Nevil’s acceptance of the world outside his coterie. He was still actively, if unconsciously, épaté-ing that world.

It was not that Robert had any desire to see the boy in customary suits of solemn black. His own suit was a grey tweed; and his country clientèle would look doubtfully on “town” clothes. (“That awful little man with the striped suits,” Marion Sharpe had said of a town-clad lawyer, in that unguarded moment on the telephone.) But there were tweeds and tweeds, and Nevil Bennet’s were the second kind. Quite outrageously the second kind.

“Robert,” Nevil said, as Robert gave it up and laid down the receiver, “I’ve finished the papers on the Calthorpe transfer, and I thought I would run into Larborough this afternoon, if you haven’t anything you want me to do.”

“Can’t you talk to her on the telephone?” Robert asked; Nevil being engaged, in the casual modern fashion, to the Bishop of Larborough’s third daughter.

“Oh, it isn’t Rosemary. She is in London for a week.

“A protest meeting at the Albert Hall, I suppose,” said Robert, who was feeling disgruntled because of his failure to speak to the Sharpes when he was primed with good news for them.

“No, at the Guildhall,” Nevil said.

“What is it this time? Vivisection?”

“You are frightfully last-century now and then, Robert,” Nevil said, with his air of solemn patience. “No one objects to vivisection nowadays except a few cranks. The protest is against this country’s refusal to give shelter to the patriot Kotovich.

“The said patriot is very badly �wanted’ in his own country, I understand.”

“By his enemies; yes.”

“By the police; for two murders.”

“Executions.”

“You a disciple of John Knox, Nevil?”

“Good God, no. What has that to do with it?”

“He believed in self-appointed executioners. The idea has a little �gone out’ in this country, I understand.