“Twenty-two minutes: I timed it. Very interesting, though. You’ll stop to lunch, Major Ames, won’t you? We lunch at one always on Sunday.”
Now Major Ames knew quite well that there was going to be at his house the lunch that followed parties, the resurrection lunch of what was dead last night. There would be little bits of salmon slightly greyer than on the evening before, peeping out from the fresh salad that covered them. There would be some sort of chaud-froid; there would be a pink and viscous fluid which was the debilitated descendant of the strawberry ice which Amy had given them. There would also be several people, including Mrs. Altham, who had not been bidden to the feast last night, but who, since they came according to the authorized Riseborough version of festivities, to the lunch next day, would certainly be bidden to dinner on the next occasion. Also, he knew well, he would have to say to Mrs. Altham, “Amy has given us cold luncheon to-day. Well, I don’t mind a cold luncheon on as hot a day as it is. Chaud-froid of chicken, Mrs. Altham. I think you’ll find that Amy’s cook understands chaud-froid.”
And all the time he knew that chaud-froid meant a dinner-party on the night before. So did the viscous fluid in the jelly glasses, so did everything else. And of course Mrs. Altham knew: everybody knew all about the lunch that followed a dinner-party. Even if the dinner-party last night had been as secret as George the Fourth’s marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert, the lunch to-day would have made it as public as any function at St. Peter’s, Eaton Square.
He thought over the unimaginable dislocation in all this routine that his absence would entail.
“I wonder if I ought to,” he said. “I fancy Amy told me she had a few friends to lunch.”
Millie Evans looked up at him. Infinitesimal as was the point as to whether he should lunch here or at home, she knew that she definitely entered herself against his wife at this moment.
“Ah, do stop,” she said. “If Cousin Amy has a few friends why shouldn’t we have one?”
He got up: he nearly took off his hat again, but again remembered.
“I take it as a command,” he said. “Am I ordered to stop?”
“Certainly. Telephone to Mrs. Ames, Wilfred, and say that Major Ames is lunching with us.”