“I can’t help that,” said Winifred. “I want him.”

With an innocent shrewd look at her mother’s face, Imogen kept silence. It was father, of course! Val did come “like a shot” at six o’clock.

Imagine a cross between a pickle and a Forsyte and you have young Publius Valerius Dartie. A youth so named could hardly turn out otherwise. When he was born, Winifred, in the heyday of spirits, and the craving for distinction, had determined that her children should have names such as no others had ever had. (It was a mercy⁠—she felt now⁠—that she had just not named Imogen Thisbe.) But it was to George Forsyte, always a wag, that Val’s christening was due. It so happened that Dartie, dining with him a week after the birth of his son and heir, had mentioned this aspiration of Winifred’s.

“Call him Cato,” said George, “it’ll be damned piquant!” He had just won a tenner on a horse of that name.

“Cato!” Dartie had replied⁠—they were a little “on” as the phrase was even in those days⁠—“it’s not a Christian name.”