The dinner proceeded much in the way of all dinners, and the ice, to which the cocktails had already dealt a sound blow, was gradually smashed into diminishing smithereens.
As the port was placed before him and the maid withdrew, Guy glanced with satisfaction round his dinner-table, on whose polished mahogany the candles in their heavy silver stands gleamed softly. The meal had gone off well, the guests had been exceedingly cheerful, and Cynthia, in a black velvet gown which admirably enhanced the white beauty of her arms and shoulders, was looking her very best. The host in Guy was full of content, the husband no less so. He poured himself out a glass of port as the decanter reached him from Dora, and beamed round once more.
The young man Doyle had pleased Guy particularly. He had shown signs of a tendency towards argument which was most gratifying; rather voluble, perhaps, and occasionally a little excitable, but good, sound argument; and if there was one form of mental exercise which Guy’s soul loved beyond all others it was argument. In the dreamy contentment that follows a perfectly good dinner he listened to Cynthia rolling the conversational ball at her end of the table and meditated on a new subject to attract Doyle’s attention from his fiancée.
“By the way,” Cynthia was remarking to George, “Monica and Alan are coming to stay with us the week after next for a few days, George. We must get up a river picnic for them.”
“Thank goodness,” Laura took it on herself to reply. “We’ve only been in Duffley three days, but I’m bored stiff with the place already. I feel wasted here. There are possibilities in a river picnic.”
“Oh, rather,” George murmured dutifully, concealing his blenches in his port-glass.
As Cynthia’s brother and sister, and consequently Guy’s brother and sister-in-law, Alan and Monica undoubtedly had every claim upon him; but he was not unduly elated at Cynthia’s news. Duffley was a nice, peaceful place, where one could get a tolerably good game of golf and smoke a quiet pipe or two in the country round. It seemed a pity to have it turned upside down, even for a few days.
George had met Alan and Monica before; the meeting had taken place two years ago, but George would never forget it. “Oh, rather,” he repeated sadly, wondering whether there were many frogs in the neighbourhood of Duffley. The last time they had met, Alan had done his best to endear himself by putting a frog in George’s bed. Neither George nor the frog had altogether appreciated the jest. George had had something of a fellow-feeling for frogs ever since.
Cynthia turned to her other neighbour. “Will you still be here, Pat?” “Mr. Doyle,” had been dropped, on command of the sisters, before the champagne had been round twice.
“I doubt it,” observed Laura darkly, from the other side of the table. It appeared that Laura had taken it upon herself to entertain the gravest doubts as to the engagement lasting for more than a few hours in the immediate future, and to give voice to those doubts upon every possible occasion. When she was not doing this, she was trying to correct, with an air of patient despondency, certain faults which she professed to see in her future brother-in-law’s manners. “For,” as she told her indignant sister, “you may be going to marry him, but I’ve got to be a sister to him; and I never could be a sister to a man who eats and drinks at the same time.”