Read Online Around the World With Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis - Free Book Online Page B

If I’d suggested going naked, Lady Gravell-Pitt couldn’t have looked more horrified.
    â€œMoss Brothers!” she spat, “Really, Mame, it’s quite difficult enough for me to bring Ameddicans out in the best London society. But even to consider
hired
clothing . . .”
    â€œOh, all right,” Auntie Mame said reasonably. “He can always wear the evening clothes at college dances, and as for that Garden Party drag, I suppose he’ll be an usher at someone’s wedding someday. You might just run down to Dover Street, darling. I know a lot of beautifully turned-out men who have their clothes made at Kilgour, French and . . .”
    â€œHowever,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said, eying me, “I know a young duke—my cousin ektualleh—who is just Patrick’s size. His suits would fit perfectly and I
think
I could get him to part with the lot for, um, for a hundred guineas.” That seemed to take care of that.
    Lady Gravell-Pitt was the sort of woman you dislike at first, but after you get to know her a little better you detest her. I got to know Hermione like a book, although I never overcame a sense of wonderment at her long, rawboned frame, the synthetic glory of her yellow hair and teeth. Somewhere between fifty and death, Hermie seemed to have been unduly influenced both by photographs of Lady Sylvia Ashley and some self-help article urging readers simply to emphasize their worst points. The final effect was pure Douglas Byng.
    I could have forgiven Lady Gravell-Pitt her hideous physical appearance if only there had been somewhere in her makeup one kindly or generous instinct. But there was none. Hermione was one of those horrible women who make a true profession out of being a Lady. If she did not stoop to posing for face powders and cleansing creams it was because no cosmetic firm was insane enough to ask her. But I never once saw Hermione when she wasn’t up to her eyeballs in a dozen little deals vaguely connected with being titled. For a fee she would get rich Canadian or Australian or American women presented at Court. At a slight consideration she could find you a dear little service flat in the West End or a duck of a house by the sea or a castle in Scotland. Hermie dealt in secondhand jewelry and silver, in used furs, in hastily cleaned ball gowns, in antiques and decorations, in household servants and social secretaries, in world cruises and sight-seeing tours of stately homes. She was delighted to lend—or rent—her name to new night clubs and restaurants, dress shops and art galleries; to anyone or anything willing to pay for the temporary use of her title. I don’t
think
that she trafficked in narcotics or white slaves, but I’ll bet that if I’d asked for a sniff of cocaine and a half-caste concubine, Hermione would have been on the telephone in a trice.
Service
was Hermie’s byword, and, in her slightly soiled silks and satins, her frumpy furs and dirty diamonds, she looked as though she’d seen a great deal of it.
    I couldn’t understand just what Auntie Mame ever saw in Hermione, but on the other hand I was never too surprised by any of the fads or people my aunt picked up. Auntie Mame— who could be astonishingly astute about some people and equally gullible about others—almost reached the breaking point during Ascot Week when she learned that she hadn’t been invited—nor apparently had Hermione—into the Royal Enclosure. Nor was Auntie Mame any too pleased when Vera, wearing more fox furs than the Queen herself, went sashaying off to Ascot on the arm of a naughty old duke.
    â€œOf cawss, Mame,
nobody
nice goes to Ascot,” Hermione tried to explain weakly.
    â€œOh, of course not!” Auntie Mame growled. “Just the King and the Queen and Queen Mary and the Duke and Duchess of Kent—trash like that!”
    â€œAnd besides, Mame,” Hermione said cloyingly, “you’re