months unnecessary slaughter, to the stolidest novelist of mid-Victorian respectability; from the most Parisianized Londoner to the most Anglified Parisian; from the latest shouting evangelist out of the State of Wisconsin to the ungodly Yorkshire peer who had varied the monotony of last year's marriage to, and divorce from, a Sussex dairymaid by this year's elopement with a Gaiety chorus-girl; from Mayfair Dives to Soho Lazarus—there wasn't a person in all that mixed assembly who did not feel a shiver of expectation as the raja entered.
Expectation of something.
Waiting tensely, dramatically, silently, for something. "Not waiting for something to happen," Charlie Thorneycroft put it. "Rather waiting for something that had already happened, you know. Which of course is infernal rot and asinine drivel. For how in the name of my canonized great-grandaunt can you wait for the future of the past tense? But—there you are!"
And Thorneycroft, of London, Calcutta, Peshawar, Melbourne, Capetown, and the British Empire in general, vaguely attached to some mythical diplomatic bureau in some unknown diplomatic capacity,
