"Where's Ingpen?"
"Not come."
"Not come! He said he should be here at eight. Just like him!" said Johnnie. "I expect he's had a puncture."
"I've been looking out for him every minute," Edwin muttered.
In the middle of the room Albert Benbow, stocky and vulgar, but feeling himself more and more a man of the world among men and women of the world, was proclaiming, not without excitement:
"Well, I agree with Mrs. Cheswardine. 'Novelty' 's much more likely than 'interest.' 'Interest' 's the wrong kind of word altogether. It doesn't agree with the beginning of the paragraph."
"That's right, Mr. Benbow," Vera encouraged him with flirtatious dimples. "You put your money on me, even if my own husband won't." Albert as a dowdy dissenter was quite out of her expensive sphere, but to Vera any man was a man.
"Now, Albert," Clara warned him, "if you win anything, you must give it to me for the new perambulator."
("Dash that girl's infernal domesticity!" thought Edwin savagely.)
"Who says I'm going in for it, missis?" Albert challenged.