'After all, I've only got to say "Trix," and he's as quiet as a lamb,' she whispered, with her glittering laugh.
It is hopelessly symptomatic of social obscurity to be dining in London in September—and that as a matter of course, and not by way of a snatch of food between two railway stations. Yet at the date borne at the top of Lady Blixworth's notepaper something more than a dinner, almost a banquet, celebrated in town an event which had taken place some hundreds of miles away. Lady Blixworth had blessed the interval between herself and her dearest Sarah, opining that it made for candour, not to say for philosophy. Something of the same notion seemed to move in Miles Childwick's brain.
'In electing to be married in the wilds of Wales,' he remarked as he lit his cigarette, 'our friends the Newtons have shown a consideration not only for our wardrobes—a point with which, I admit, I was preoccupied—but also for our feelings. Yet we, by subscribing a shilling each towards a wire, deliberately threw away the main advantage of the telegraphic system. We could have expressed our aspirations for sixpence; as it is, we were led into something perilously like discussion. Finally, at Mrs. John's urgent request, and in order not to have sixpence left on our hands, we committed ourselves to the audacious statement that we had foreseen it from the first.'
'So I did—since Airey's dinner,' declared Mrs. John stoutly.
'A delusion of your trade, Mrs. John. For my part I hope I have something better to do than go about foreseeing people's marriages.'
'Something different, old fellow,' Arty suggested, with an air of being anxious to guard the niceties of the language.
'I wonder if I could write a story about her,' mused Mrs. John, unusually talkative.
'I have so often told Mrs. John in print—anonymously, of course, because of our friendship—that she can't write a story about anything, that I sha'n't discuss the particular case. As a general principle, I object to books about failures. Manson, do you take an interest in humble tragedies?'
'Only in a brief marked two and one,' said Manson Smith.
'Exactly! Or in a par at seven-and-six.'