Miss Allonby found my Lord Duke of Ormskirk deep in an infinity of papers. But at her entrance he rose and with a sign dismissed his secretary.
It appears appropriate here to afford you some notion of Ormskirk's exterior. I pilfer from Löwe's memoir of him, where Horace Calverley, who first saw Ormskirk at about this time, is quoted:
"His Grace was in blue-and-silver, which became him, though he is somewhat stomachy for such conspicuous colors. A handsome man, I would have said, honest but not particularly intelligent.... Walpole, in a fit of spleen, once called him 'a porcelain sphinx,' and the phrase sticks; but, indeed, there is more of the china-doll about him. He possesses the same too-perfect complexion, his blue eyes have the same spick-and-span vacuity; and the fact that the right orb is a trifle larger than its fellow gives his countenance, in repose, much the same expression of placid astonishment.... Very plump, very sleepy-looking, immaculate as a cat, you would never have accorded him a second glance: covert whisperings that the stout gentleman yonder is the great Duke of Ormskirk have, I think, taxed human belief more than once during these ten years past."
They said of Ormskirk that he manifested a certain excitement on the day after Culloden, when he had seventy-two prisoners shot en masse, but this was doubted; and in any event, such battues being comparatively rare, he by ordinary appeared to regard the universe with a composed and feline indifference.
