"I forget his name. I've only met him once, here at tea. I think he's a tea-merchant. He seemed to remember me all right."
"A tea-merchant! I wonder why Mrs. John put him on her right, then, and Mr. Enwright on her left." George resented the precedence.
"Is Mr. Enwright really very great, then?"
"Great! You bet he is.... I was in Paris with him in the summer. Whereabouts do you live in Paris?"
She improved, especially at the point where she said that Mr. Enwright's face was one of the most wonderful faces that she had ever seen. Evidently she knew Paris as well as George knew London. Apparently she had always lived there. But their interchanges concerning Paris, on a sofa in the drawing-room, were stopped by a general departure. Mr. Enwright began it. The tea-merchant instantly supported the movement. Miss Ingram herself rose. The affair was at an end. Nothing interesting had been said in the general talk, and little that was sincere. No topic had been explored, no argument taken to a finish. No wit worth mentioning had glinted. But everybody had behaved very well, and had demonstrated that he or she was familiar with the usages of society and with aspects of existence with which it was proper to be familiar. And everybody—even Mr. Enwright—thanked Mrs. John most heartily for her quite delightful luncheon; Mrs. John insisted warmly on her own pleasure and her appreciation of her guests' extreme good
nature in troubling to come, and she was beyond question joyously triumphant. And George, relieved, thought, as he tried to rival the rest in gratitude to Mrs. John:
"What was it all about? What did they all come for? I came because she made me. But why did the others come?"
The lunch had passed like a mild nightmare, and he felt as though, with the inconsequence of dream-people, these people had gone away without having accomplished some essential act which had been the object of their gathering.
IV
When George came out of the front door, he beheld Miss Ingram on the kerb, in the act of getting into a very rich fur coat. A chauffeur, in a very rich livery, was deferentially helping her. Behind them stretched a long, open motor-car. This car, existing as it did at a time when the public acutely felt that automobiles splashed respectable foot-farers with arrogant mud and rendered unbearable the lives of the humble in village streets, was of the immodest kind described, abusively, as 'powerful and luxurious.' The car of course drew attention, because it had yet occurred to but few of anybody's friends that they might themselves possess even a modest car, much less an immodest one. George had not hitherto personally known a single motor-car owner.