With most English speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little _asoleadero_, we discussed pheasant shooting, and the best places for haberdashery and “Gladstone Bags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant, and didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.
To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215: “Bertie always shoots the twelfth.”
The best place for haberdashery, in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion, was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.
“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went, for Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.
“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there was also in the room a recently made up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.