At Lady Molly's

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WE had known General Conyers immemorially not because my father had ever served under him but through some long-forgotten connexion with my mother’s parents, to one or other of whom he may even have been distantly related. In any case, he was on record as having frequented their house in an era so remote and legendary that, if commission was no longer by purchase, regiments of the line were still designated by a number instead of the name of a county. In spite of belonging to this dim, archaic period, traces of which were sometimes revealed in his dress and speech — he was, for example, one of the last to my knowledge to speak of the Household Cavalry as ‘the Plungers’—his place in family myth was established not only as a soldier with interests beyond his profession, but even as a man of the world always ‘abreast of the times’. This taste for being in the fashion and giving his opinion on every subject was held against him by some people, notably Uncle Giles, no friend of up-to-date thought, and on principle suspicious of worldly success, however mild.

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