Short Saturday: Georgette Heyer

For Short Saturday, a passage that made me laugh out loud this week:

It would have been as well if he had taken his son with him, instead of leaving him to drink himself into a potvaliant condition in the company of a like-minded young man whose reckless statements of what he would do if he stood in Ned’s shoes strengthened his resolve to draw Mr. Claud Darracott’s cork at the earliest opportunity. By the time an astonishing quantity of heavy wet and several glasses of jackey had been drunk, the propensity of the entire aristocracy and gentry for grinding the faces of the poor under their heels discussed and the date of a revolution modelled after the French pattern settled, Ned Ackleton was determined to seek out Mr. Claud Darracott immediately, and Jim Booley, applauding this bold decision, announced his intention of accompanying him. The landlord, contemptuously watching the manner of their departure, gave it as his opinion that the courage of neither would be sufficient to carry him beyond the gates of Darracott Place. In uttering this prophecy, however, he failed to make allowance for the invigorating effect of companionship. The harbingers of the revolution reached the house itself before Booley realized that it would be improper for him to take an active part in a quarrel which was no concern of his.

From The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer © 1959.

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