Crane, however, did not allow him to finish his sentence.
"Thank you," he said briskly. "That will be delightful. We shall be starting at half-past twelve."
IX
ELIOT'S large library, to which Crane and his party were led on their arrival, looked as only a room can look which has been occupied for several hours by a number of idle men. All the sofa cushions were on the floor, all the newspapers were on the sofas, cigarette ashes were everywhere, and the air was heavy with a combination of wood and tobacco smoke, everybody's hair was ruffled, as if they had all been sitting on the back of their heads, and Eliot, himself, now standing commandingly on the hearth-rug, was saying:
"Yes, and he did not have a sound leg when he bought him, and that must have been in 1909, for I remember it was the last year I went to Melton—" He broke off reluctantly to greet his guests.
Lefferts, who looked peculiarly neat and fresh among his companions, approached Burton, who was beside Mrs. Falkener.
"They have been talking for three hours," he observed, "about a splint on the nigh foreleg of a gray horse that doesn't belong to any of them. Sit down, Mrs. Falkener, and let us have a little rational conversation. Doesn't that idea attract you?"
"Not particularly, since you ask me," replied Mrs. Falkener, not deigning even to look at the poet, but sweeping her head about slowly as if scanning vast horizons.
"The rational doesn't attract you," Lefferts went on cheerfully. "Well, then we must try something else. How about the fantastic-sardonical, or the comic-fantastical, or even better, the—"