_Smith_
is just as badly if more soberly hit, and recognising the impossibility of
the situation (quite apart from demonstrations by the alarmed _Broughtons_)
decides to take his tape and shears to his London house of business. The
date of all this being about the time of the misguided _Panther's_ fateful
leap on Agadir.
Act II. brings us to the second year of the War. Young _Broughton_, puppy
no longer, is gloriously in it, and has just been gazetted to a Territorial
regiment whose Colonel bears the not uncommon name of Smith. Our tailor, of
course, and a rattling fine soldier too. Having discovered this latter fact
and also formed a remarkably cordial relationship apparently in a single
day, the enthusiastic cub subaltern (distemper and snobbishness over and
done with) motors up his C.O., who is visiting his brother and partner, and
brings him in to Grange Court on the way. _Sir Dennys_, now a brassarded
private and otherwise a converted man, is still confoundedly embarrassed,
and stands anything but easy in the presence of his youngster's Colonel.
_Lady Broughton_, least malleable of the group, is frankly appalled by this
new _mesalliance_. Perhaps Mr. TERRY'S version of blue-blooded insolence
and fatuity is for his stage purpose rather crudely coloured, but who shall
say that the doctrine that a man in khaki who has been an elementary
schoolmaster or a tailor is a man for a' that, is quite universally
accepted in the best circles even in this year of grace? _Betty_, now a
grown girl in the cynical stage, revenges herself with feline savagery on
the knight of the shears for the imagined slight of his defection.
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