12/23 The incident served to disequilibrate, as one might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found myself in heart to heart conversation with my neighbour on the right, a florid, simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's Sheriff of the City of London, whose consuming ambition was to become a member of the Athenaeum Club. When I informed him that I was privileged to enter that Valley of Dry Bones--my late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous Master of Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions, I think, before I was born--my sugar broker almost fell at my feet and worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were overrun with Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail, he refused to be disillusioned. |