Nancy Boys? Why of course!
It’s interesting you mentioned Eustace. You may know that the longtime mascot of The New Yorker was a cartoon Regency dandy called Eustace Tilley.
He was decked out in a top hat and fancy cravat, peering at the world through a lorgnette.
Why The New Yorker, under the editorship of tough old Harold Ross, would brand itself with an effete character out of a Georgette Heyer novel is a mystery I’ve never tried to solve.
I’ve read a fair bit about the history of The New Yorker in its glory days. My impression is that it may have been the most editor-driven magazine ever published in the USA, to the point where you have to wonder how much of each story was really the writer’s.
Having written professionally for 25 years — never in anything as prestigious as The New Yorker — I can tell you that anal-retentive editors can make your life hell. From what I read, The New Yorker paid well, but not top dollar.
Still, the work of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell is still worth reading today. If you can get a hold of Mitchell’s “The Bottom of the Harbor,” a collection of essays about maritime New York, by all means read it.
At this point, Eustace is reformed, but we see where he was spawned:
He led them rapidly through the wood, and before they had gone many paces, the wall of Experiment House appeared before them. Then Aslan roared so that the sun shook in the sky and thirty feet of the wall fell down before them. They looked through the gap, down into the school shrubbery and onto the roof of the gym, all under the same dull autumn sky which they had seen before their adventures began. Aslan turned to Jill and Eustace and breathed upon them and touched their foreheads with his tongue. Then he lay down amid the gap he had made in the wall and turned his golden back to England, and his lordly face towards his own lands. At the same moment Jill saw figures whom she knew only too well running up through the laurels towards them. Most of the gang were there—Adela Pennyfather and Cholmondely Major, Edith Winterblott, "Spotty" Sorner, big Bannister, and the two loathsome Garrett twins. But suddenly they stopped. Their faces changed, and all the meanness, conceit, cruelty, and sneakishness almost disappeared in one single expression of terror. For they saw the wall fallen down, and a lion as large as a young elephant lying in the gap, and three figures in glittering clothes with weapons in their hands rushing down upon them. For, with the strength of Aslan in them, Jill plied her crop on the girls and Caspian and Eustace plied the flats of their swords on the boys so well that in two minutes all the bullies were running like mad, crying out, "Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn't fair." And then the Head (who was, by the way, a woman) came running out to see what was happening. And when she saw the lion and the broken wall and Caspian and Jill and Eustace (whom she quite failed to recognise) she had hysterics and went back to the house and began ringing up the police with stories about a lion escaped from a circus, and escaped convicts who broke down walls and carried drawn swords. In the midst of all this fuss Jill and Eustace slipped quietly indoors and changed out of their bright clothes into ordinary things, and Caspian went back into his own world. And the wall, at Aslan's word, was made whole again. When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing. And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.