"Ha!" Sir John exclaimed, seizing an egg. "Will you crack an egg with me, Alderman? I can crack an egg with anybody."
"Thanks," said Edward Henry. "I'll be very glad to." And he advanced towards the table.
Sir John hesitated. The fact was that, though he dissembled his dismay with marked histrionic skill, he was unquestionably overwhelmed by astonishment. In the course of years he had airily invited hundreds of callers to crack an egg with him—the joke was one of his favourites—but nobody had ever ventured to accept the invitation.
"Chung," he said weakly, "lay a cover for the Alderman."
Edward Henry sat down quite close to Sir John. He could discern all the details of Sir John's face and costume. The tremendous celebrity was wearing a lounge-suit somewhat like his own, but instead of the coat he had a blue dressing-jacket with crimson facings; the sleeves ended in rather long wristbands, which were unfastened, the opal cuff-links drooping each from a single hole. Perhaps for the first time in his life Edward Henry intimately understood what idiosyncratic elegance was. He could almost feel the emanating personality of Sir John Pilgrim, and he was intimidated by it; he was intimidated by its hardness, its harshness, its terrific egotism, its utterly brazen quality. Sir John's glance was the most purely arrogant that Edward Henry had ever encountered. It knew no reticence. And Edward Henry thought: "When this chap dies he'll want to die in public, with the reporters round his bed and a private secretary taking down messages."
"This is rather a lark," said Sir John, recovering.
"It is," said Edward Henry, who now felicitously perceived that a lark it indeed was, and ought to be treated as such. "It shall be a lark!" he said to himself.
Sir John dictated a letter to Miss Taft, and before the letter was finished the grinning Chung had laid a place for Edward Henry, and Snip had inspected him and passed him for one of the right sort.
"Had I said that this is rather a lark?" Sir John inquired, the letter accomplished.
"I forget," said Edward Henry.