but the idea
of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally
incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended
to know) Sir Claude Champion, as "one of the brightest and wealthiest of
England's Upper Ten"; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the
world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as
the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory
Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and,
above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other
than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about
his omnivorous culture and restless publicity--, he was not only a great
amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian
frivolity that we convey by the word "dilettante".

That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had
been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun,
gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire,
or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude--a
great deal more, in fact, than there was to know--it would never have
crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the
newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude
Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according
to Dalroy's account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in
couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had
been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a
millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately,
an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other.
Indeed, Boulnois's cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon
Park.

But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a
dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a
beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his
own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to
Champion's had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving
in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement.
Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he
seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an
intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon
were perp