My sister and I followed him into a pleasant salon meekly enough. When he had written his letter, he read it to us with the air of a cardinal.
DEAR EVELYN,
"LEST WE FORGET."
Yes, I know. But you should be more careful. Old friends like us, too. Disgraceful, I call it. To have been unprepared to receive us would have been bad enough, but to be actually absent from home…. Well, as Wordsworth says, that's bent it.
When I tell you that, in the belief that she was to enjoy a free lunch, my beloved yoke-fellow, who is just now very hot upon economy, forewent her breakfast and arrived upon your threshold faint and ravening, you will conceive the emotion with which she hailed the realization that that same hunger which she had encouraged could only be appeased at an expensive hotel.
But that is nothing.
To bless your married life, I have hustled a valuable internal combustion engine over one of the vilest roads in Europe, twice risked a life, the loss of which would, as you know, lower half the flags in Bethnal Green, and postponed many urgent and far more deserving calls upon my electric personality. I was, for instance, to have had my hair cut.
Worse.
Upon hearing of your absence, the unnatural infidel above referred to charged this to my account. As is my humble wont, I bent my head to the storm, strong in the fearless confidence that France is France, and that, late as we were, the ever-open bar would not be closed.
"Tell me more of yourself," I hear you say.