The Lord Mayor wrote his resolutions with a flourish.
"I'll have that framed," he said, as he gazed with head a-slant at the inscribed menu. The Archdeacon wrote his in Latin verse. Emmanuel Oldstein--far away--began his with a gold pencil as large as a cigar; and then paused, puzzled.
"'Ow d'ye thpell fairieth--oh, and what are fairieth?"
He had a faint fear that they were something to do with the Book of Common Prayer.
The man he addressed was a Personage, the Past-Master of a City Company--which had no longer a Hall, and was blessed with a dwindling income of seventy pounds per annum.
"The fairies," he began, with a tremendous air of authority--"tales, you know--ah!--the fairies--."
Bim, who happened to be wandering along his part of the table, hearing this hesitancy on the most real and important subject under the sun and moon, raised the wand and gave him a punishing rap on the knuckles. At once the Past-Master was an informed authority. He talked like a school child who knows his lesson too well, hurriedly, glibly.
"The fairies are the mimic rulers of the world. Where beauty is, where purity is, where love is, there is Fairyland. Oberon is the king, Titania queen. The little people are the only living realities. We--you--I, these others--are shadows, only shadows!" He paused. "May I trouble you to pass that candle?" he asked, and lighted a new cigar.
Oldstein was impressed. He wrote his resolutions--there were necessarily many, as his past social defects had been numerous--with firmness and slow care, in a good commercial hand. While he did so, the music was playing, and there were brief, ecstatic, uninspired speeches, built on the lines of the Lord Mayor's. June waited for higher game.
At last the Toast-master's voice rang out for the last of their orators.