"And want to nobble the place!" he growled. "_I_ know the type, George. Climbing, climbing.... They're beer, aren't they. I dislike brewers."
"I don't suppose they'll ask you to buy any."
"More honest of them if they did. A brewer's bad, but a brewer who's ashamed of his brewing...."
"Are you going to invite them or are you not?" I interrupted.
"Make it one of our Dull Evenings," he begged resignedly. "_Really_ dull; wipe off all old scores. You can ask Ashwell, and Lady Ullswater, she'll be very helpful to them, and--oh, I'll leave it in your hands. Give me somebody tolerable on either side."
The dinner took place some weeks later in the early part of May and for a Thursday, and a designedly Dull Evening, was quite bearable. I took in Sonia and had Sally Farwell on my left; her mother, Lady Marlyn, went in with my uncle. I have forgotten how the others sorted themselves out, but conversation was maintained at an even flow, and no one seemed in an undue hurry to leave. And to Bertrand or any one trained by him to look dispassionately on at "the great movement of life," there was a quarter scene from the Human Comedy being played round his own table. The actors steadied to their pose as the butler cried their names. I observed that the Daintons had wasted no time since we met at Carteret Lodge: they were blasés and overdriven with the wearing life of Society.
"I've _said_ I'd give a ball," sighed Lady Dainton. "Really ... dreadful fatigue, don't you know?"
And Lady Ullswater sidled up, shaking her wonderful head of perennially chestnut hair.
"Not if you go the right way about it, dear Lady Dainton. Of course, it's rather presumptuous of _me_ to advise _you_, but...."
And in front of me, through me and over my head at dinner, Sonia and Sally Farwell bandied impressive names. With both of them it was the first Season, and each seemed to aim at showing the other--and me--the important figure she had succeeded in cutting. Sir Roger, always shy and more than ever out of his element, postured as the bluff Tory Squire who hated London and all its works. John Ashwell, who was the son of a highly respected North-country solicitor before he took to peddling names of eligible bachelors, shook his head over the plebeian admixture of society, illustrated by an account of that day's luncheon with the dowager Duchess of Flint. Even poor Lady Marlyn, who was stone-deaf, caught the infection of play-acting and pretended to hear and appreciate the dialect stories of the American attaché on her right.