"If you keep off it I can give you a job weeding for three days."
He did not want the work. He wanted a shilling, and he got it; and I saw to it that he did not spend it in my house.
We have got a very nice billiard-room upstairs now. Two new tables and everything ship-shape. You may find Harry there most evenings. It is all right. But I have never taken to billiards again myself.
And where the old billiard-room was there are flower-beds. The pansies that grow there have got funny markings—like figures.
SPARKLING BURGUNDY
In London a day in mid-August drew to its close. The air was motionless, the pavements were hot. Weary children came home with the perambulator from the sand-pit of Regent's Park or the playground of Kensington Gardens. Young men from the city wore straw hats and thronged the outside of motor-omnibuses. Oxford Street, that singularly striving street, was still striving, still exhibiting some of its numerous activities. Starting from a humble and Holborn origin, it lives to touch the lips of Park Lane, but it goes to Bayswater when it dies. It was still protesting that it was not tired and still crowded with traffic. Irregular masses of buildings and heavy dusty trees stood out darkly against a sky of fainting lettuce colour. Young Mrs Bablove noticed them as she came out of the Tube station, drawing her cloak round her unwonted evening-dress. "Yes," said her husband, as she called his attention to the effect. "Striking." It was scarcely a minute's walk from the station to the Restaurant Merveilleux, where they were to be the guests of Mr Albert Carver.
The Restaurant Merveilleux does its best. It has an arc-lamp and a medium-sized commissionaire. It bears its name proudly in gilt letters a foot and a half high. In the entrance are bay trees in green tubs and a framed bill of our celebrated diner du jour at half-a-crown. Within are little tables brightly appointed and many electric lights. A mahogany screen is carved with challenging pine-apples and grapes, and against it is a table for six. Mr Carver had reserved this table. Yet somehow one gets the correct impression that this is a small eating-house under Italian proprietorship.
The occasion of the little dinner given by this bachelor and viveur was the engagement of Ada Bunting to Harold Simcox. Albert Carver had received much hospitality from Miss Bunting's parents. He had as nearly as possible got engaged to Miss Bunting himself, and now knew what the condemned man feels like who is unexpectedly reprieved. Miss Bunting and Mr Simcox were the guests of importance. She was lymphatic and pale-haired; her future husband was smaller and a shade shorter than she. He concentrated on politeness, and made anyone to whom he spoke feel like a possible customer. As for Mr and Mrs Bablove, Mr Albert Carver had always intended to ask them, if he ever asked anybody. He frankly admired young Mrs Bablove, and said so, and was slightly pleased when this created surprise and it was suggested that she was hardly his type. It seemed to imply that Mr Carver was a problem, and this was subtly flattering to Mr Carver—who, if a problem, was singularly soluble. It is true none the less that the women whom Albert Carver admired were mostly fleshy and exuberant. Mrs Bablove looked like an angel who had gone into domestic service—a soul in servitude. She had to make a just-sufficient income suffice, and as she was devoted to her husband and her two little boys she did a good deal of work herself. She had a sweet and rather childish nature, was not without some true æsthetic perception, and under less stringent limitations might have developed further. Mr Bablove, a very quiet and prosaic man, who wore spectacles only when he was reading, made about the same income as Mr Carver. They both held responsible positions in the same firm. They both lived in the same street in the Shepherd's Bush neighbourhood. But Mr Bablove's income had to provide for a household, and Mr Albert Carver's income was all ear-marked for Mr Albert Carver. There was less splendour in Mr Bablove's house than in Mr Carver's wicked flat with the hookah (from the cut-price tobacconist) standing on the low inlaid table and the French photogravure of a bathing subject over the mantelpiece.