‘I have taken a great fancy to a young lady named Laura,’ he [Evelyn Waugh] wrote to Mary Lygon.

What is she like? Well, fair, very pretty, plays peggoty beautifully… She has rather a long thin nose and skin as thin as bromo and she is very thin and might be dying of consumption to look at her… and she is only 18 years old…

— Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter

“Rex telephoned me this morning and told me everything! What were your girl friends like?”
“Don’t be prurient,” said Sebastian.
“Mine was like a skull.”
“Mine was like a consumptive.”

— Brideshead Revisited

Does anyone know what peggoty is? Google is no help.

[Bridget Grant’s] younger sister, Laura Herbert, was married to Evelyn Waugh. The novelist’s relations with his in-laws were stormy to bad. Those with Bridget were the exception: he admired and was amused by her, and she is generally thought to have been the model for Barbara Sothill, the beautiful billeting officer in Put Out More Flags, whose difficulties with a family called Connolly are the inspiration for her brother Basil Seal’s most successful wartime scam.

[…]

Holidays were spent at Portofino, in a large villa set in acres of steeply terraced vines and olive trees built by Aubrey’s father. In 1933 a fashionable young novelist was invited by Gabriel Herbert, the eldest sister, to join the house-party at Portofino. His name was Evelyn Waugh and he had been recently, and disastrously, married to Evelyn Gardner, first cousin to the Herbert girls on their father’s side. It was not an auspicious occasion. Mary Herbert threw a knife at him and ordered him out of the house for mocking the Irish. Bridget, taking pity, drove the young man up and down the Ligurian coast until word came that her mother had retired to bed. It was the beginning of many years of mediating friendship.

A year later, when Waugh began to pay court to the 18-year-old Laura Herbert, her mother was not pleased; and an aunt in common to both the Herberts and Evelyn Gardner was heard to murmur: “I thought we had seen the last of that young man.”

In the early 1930s Bridget was taken by her mother to Albania, where she caught the eye of King Zog. But she was always firm in rebutting the rumour that he had asked for her hand in marriage: “He offered me yachts and villas by the sea, which is not the same thing at all.” Less exotic suitors congregated at Pixton, where the more diffident stood and shivered, while dogs sat on chairs and jumped in and out of the always open windows. Arrangements were mulled over at great and inconclusive length in a fashion later satirised by Waugh in his depiction of Boot Magna in Scoop:

“For over an hour the details of Priscilla’s hunt occupied the dining-room. Could she send her horse overnight to a farm near the meet; could she leave the Caldicotes at dawn, pick up her horse at Boot Magna, and ride on; could she borrow Major Watkins’s trailer and take her horse to the Caldicotes for the night, then as far as Major Watkins’s in the morning and ride on from there; if she got the family car from Aunt Anne and Major Watkins’ trailer, would Lady Caldicote lend her a car to take it to Major Watkins’s, would Aunt Anne allow the car to stay the night; would she discover it was taken without her permission? They discussed the question exhaustively, from every angle… “

This continued to be the flavour of conversations in and around Pixton for decades to come.