"Yes," he went on, "and what a crime that all this should be vulgarized." He included the firmament in an ample gesture. "I expect your aunt told you that this will be our last summer in Spaborough? We didn't come here to be pestered by trippers. That boarding-house next door is a disgrace to South Parade. They were playing a gramophone last night—laughing and talking out there on the steps until after one o'clock. How people expect to get any benefit from their holidays I don't know. We'd always been free from that sort of rowdiness until they opened that pernicious boarding-house next door, and now it's worse than Bank Holiday. Some people seem blind to the beauty round them. I suppose when the moon gets to the full we shall hear them jabbering out there till dawn. What have you been doing to my paper? It's utterly disorganized!"
Jasmine diverted her uncle's attention from the newspaper to the basket of prickly pears that she had brought from Sirene, and invited him to try one.
Sir Hector examined his niece's unnatural fruit as the night before he had examined his brother's unnatural fruit.
"Well, I don't know," he hemmed. "We're rather old-fashioned people here, you know."
"I think the prickles have all been taken out," said Jasmine encouragingly, "but you'd better be careful in case they haven't."
Sir Hector had been on the verge of prodding one of the pears, but at his niece's warning he drew back in alarm; and just then the clock on the mantelpiece struck nine. Before the last stroke died away the whole family was sitting down to breakfast. Jasmine's punctuality was evidently a great satisfaction to her relatives, and if she did look rather like a chocolate drop that had fallen into the tray reserved for fondants, she felt much more at home now than she had at dinner last night. Nothing occurred to mar the amity of the breakfast-table until Lady Grant's fat fox-terrier began to tear round the room as if possessed by a devil, clawing from time to time at his nose with both front paws and turning somersaults. Lady Grant, who ascribed all the ills of dogs to picking up unlicensed scraps, rang the bell and asked severely if Hargreaves, whose duty it was to supervise the dog's early morning promenade, had allowed him to eat anything in the road; but it was Jasmine who diagnosed his complaint correctly.
"I think he has been sniffing the prickly pears," she said.
"But what dangerous things to leave about!" exclaimed her aunt. "Hargreaves, take the basket out into the kitchen and tell cook to empty them carefully—carefully, mind, or she may hurt herself—into the pineapple dish. She had better wear gloves. And if she can't manage them," Lady Grant called after the parlourmaid, who was gingerly carrying out the basket at arm's length, "if she can't manage them, they must be burnt. On no account must they be thrown into the dustbin. I'm sorry that we don't appreciate your Italian fruit," she added, turning to her niece, "I'm afraid you'll find us very stay-at-home people, and you know English servants hate anything in the least unusual."
"How they must hate me!" Jasmine thought.
"And what is the programme for to-day?" asked Sir Hector suddenly, flinging down the paper with such a crackle that Jasmine would not have been more startled if like a clown he had jumped clean through it into the conversation.