We did not sip our soup, but we worked at it. It tasted like boiled everything, served up with the water. There were nasty little flecks of red and streaks of yellow in it. One expected anything, at each spoonful. Not if I had been starving, could I have eaten it. Arthur Tamworth plodded along laboriously, like a youth with his way to make in the world, and Letitia, as hostess, evidently felt bound by the rules of etiquette to do what she could. She had recovered her equanimity, wonderful little girl!
"As we were saying before dinner," she remarked, trying not to look at the odious Sylvia, as she clattered away the plates, "the modern novel does seem to have deteriorated. If you consider all these irritating romances, so vastly inferior to the splendid imaginings of Dumas, you must admit the weakness, the effeminacy of such efforts to-day. It assuredly does seem as though all virility had departed from the modern band of so-called romance-weavers—"
Letitia's effort at "polite conversation" suddenly ceased. The homard naturel arrived and we could scarcely believe our eyes. Instead of the splendid crustacean that we had anticipated—the glowing macrurous delicacy that we had expected to see crouching in a juggle of water-cress—a hideous can, with a picture of a lobster on it, was placed before me. The can had been opened, and there, in poisonous looking obsequiousness, lurked our homard naturel.
"This is absurd," I said, and my voice shook. Tamworth was an old friend, but sometimes old friends respond to insult, apparently deliberate.
"I—I—can't understand," Letitia managed to say. "What—what is it?"
"Simply a can of lobster," replied Arthur Tamworth, with a pleasant smile; "and very good it is, too, no doubt. Suppose you assist us, Fairfax, and cease looking as though you had lost all your available relatives, and your wife's as well."
To say that I felt mortified was to put the matter mildly. The fact that Tamworth was generously trying to make the best of things irritated me the more. After all, at a little dinner, one does not want charity, even though it be supposed to "begin at home." I was too overcome to eat, though I saw Letitia frowning at me and noticed that she was partaking liberally. I was so angry that I could have torn up my dinner-card. The "Children at Play" on Tamworth's did not seem so awfully inappropriate, after all. "Children Playing at Dinner" would have been more to the point, though.
"What are your views on the servant question, Mrs. Fairfax?" asked Arthur Tamworth lightly, as he toyed with a piece of what looked like brick-red india-rubber. "Do you know"—with a smile—"that I am studying it? Positively I am."
A look of freezing severity appeared on Letitia's face. In a voice shiveringly Arctic, she asked: "What is the servant question, Mr. Tamworth? I have never heard of it. If you imagine—"
"Not at all, Mrs. Fairfax, not at all"—he made the rejoinder quickly—"I do not imagine that you will let it upset you. But, honestly, it is one of the topics of the day."