"I have always thought," says Mr. Kelly, in a tone of reflective sadness, "what an uncomfortable position that must be."
"What must be?"
"Lying on one's face and hands. What becomes of the rest of one? Does one keep one's heels in the air whilst doing it? To me it sounds awful! Yet only last week I read in the papers of a fellow who was found on a road on his face and hands, and the doctors said he must have been in that position for hours! Fancy—your nose, for instance, Rossmoyne, in the mud, and your heels in the air, for hours!"
Lord Rossmoyne, having vainly tried to imagine his dignified body in such a position, looks distinctly offended.
"No, nobody would like it," says Kelly, pathetically, answering his disgusted look exactly as if it had been put into words. "There is a shameful frivolity about it not to be countenanced for a moment. Yet good and wise men have been said to do it. Fancy the Archbishop of Canterbury, now, balancing himself on his nose and his palms! Oh! it can't be true!"
His voice by this time is positively piteous, and he looks earnestly around, as though longing for some one to support his disbelief.
"You are really excelling yourself to-night," says Mrs. Herrick, in a delicately disdainful tone.
"Am I? I am glad," humbly, "that you have had an opportunity of seeing me at my poor best."
"I wonder," says Desmond, suddenly, "if, when old O'Connor revisits the earth at the witching hour, he comes in the attitude so graphically described by Kelly? In acrobat fashion, I mean."
At this Monica breaks into laughter so merry, so full of utterly childish abandon and enjoyment, that all the others perforce join in it.