“I’m sure I don’t grudge him his dinner,” he said, “and, in point of fact, I told him he could come and dine with us before his first meeting. He’s got some Cabinet Minister with him, and I said he could bring him too. You might get up a little party, that’s to say if I’m not in bed with this infernal lumbago. And Cousin James will return our hospitality by giving us seats on the platform to hear him stamp and stammer and rant. An infernal bad speaker. Never heard a worse. Wretched delivery, nothing to say, and says it all fifty times over. Enough to make a man turn Radical. However, he’ll have made himself at home with my Mumm, and perhaps he’ll go to sleep himself before he sends us off.”
This, of course, represented the lumbago-view. Major Ames had been fulsomely cordial to Cousin James, and had himself urged the dinner that he represented now as being forced on him.
“Have you actually asked him, Lyndhurst?” said Mrs. Ames rather faintly. “Did he say he would come?”
“Did you ever know your Cousin James refuse a decent dinner?” asked Lyndhurst. “And he was kind enough to say he would like it at a quarter past seven. Cool, upon my word! I wish I had asked him if he’d have thick soup or clear, and if he preferred a wing to a leg. That’s the sort of thing one never thinks of till afterwards.”
Mrs. Ames was not attending closely: there was that below the surface which claimed all her mind. Consequently she missed the pungency of this irony, hearing only the words.
“Cousin James never takes soup at all,” she said. “He told me it always disagreed.”
Major Ames sighed; his lumbago felt less acute, his ill-temper had found relief in words, and he had long ago discovered that women had no sense of humour. On the whole, it was gratifying to find the truth of this so amply endorsed. For the moment it put him into quite a good temper.
“I’m afraid I’ve been grumbling all dinner,” he said. “Shall we go into the other room? There’s little sense in my looking at the decanters, if I mayn’t take my glass of port. Eh! That was a twinge!”
CHAPTER XI
“It is no use, Henry,” said Mrs. Altham on that same evening, “telling me it is all stuff and nonsense, when I’ve seen with my own eyes the parcel of Suffragette riband being actually directed to Mrs. Brooks; for pen and ink is pen and ink, when all is said and done. Tapworth measured off six yards of it on the counter-measure that gives two feet, for he gave nine lengths of it and put it in paper and directed it. Of course, if nine lengths of two feet doesn’t make eighteen feet, which is six yards, I am wrong and you are right, and twice two no longer makes four. And there were two other parcels already done up of exactly the same shape. You will see if I am not right. Or do you suppose that Mrs. Brooks is ordering it just to trim her nightgown with it?”