“I don’t know, but I must,” said Martin.
“But it doesn’t hurt you to play a creaky organ. And the stained-glass windows don’t hurt you.”
Frank had seen further than this.
“How necessary do you feel it?” he asked. “That is the whole point. Is it as necessary as—as Chopin?”
The door opened and Hortense entered.
“Sept heures et demi, madame,” she said.
Lady Sunningdale started to her feet.
“Monsters, you must go at once,” she cried. “Yes, dear Martin, it is too interesting! You will play to us this evening, won’t you? So glad you could come; and did you ever see such a mess as the dogs have made? But those things don’t hurt you any more than brushing one’s teeth hurts, though it cannot help being a terribly inartistic performance. And you ought to consider Helen, as well. Not that it matters what church one belongs to, as far as I can see. Sunningdale might become a Parsee to-morrow if it would make him any happier, only there really is no sun in England; so I don’t see what he would worship. How nice always to sit in the sun and say one was worshipping! Yes. You extraordinary boy, fancy your being religious in your little inside. I should never have guessed it. But you got quite pink when you talked about Chartries church. Most religious people are so dull. Is that a dreadful thing to say, too? Dinner at eight. Take him and shew him his room, Frank.”
Lady Sunningdale certainly had the knack of bringing quite unique combinations of people together and of making them behave quite characteristically of their respective selves. She herself—this may partly account for it—behaved with such child-like naturalness that it was quite impossible for those with her to be self-conscious. As a hostess she was quite incomparable, for rejecting all known conventions which are supposed to be binding on that very responsible class, instead of behaving to each of her guests as if he was a mere unit in the colourless mass known as society, she talked direct and unmitigated “shop” appropriate to each. To-night there was present among her guests a traveller in Central Thibet, to whom she talked cannibal-shop, so much encouraging him that his account of his adventures became scarcely narratable; an astronomer who knew Mars better, it appeared, than the majority of dwellers on this terrestrial globe know the county in which they live; several cabinet ministers who received relays of telegrams during dinner (always a charming incident), their wives, whose main preoccupations were appendicitis, golf, and babies; a duchess of American extraction, who shied violently when the words “pig” or “Chicago” were mentioned; and a German princess who, when directly questioned, seemed doubtful as to where her husband’s principality lay, and was corrected on the subject by the astronomer. But owing perhaps to the advent of the Twin (the name by which Lady Sunningdale referred to Martin), though she had previously confessed that she found her guests “dreadful,” to-night she went bravely ahead, steering a triumphant course over shoals where she grounded heavily and dashing on to rocks that should have made a wreck of her. The dinner-table was round; she herself set an excellent example by screaming over smilax and chrysanthemums to the person most distantly removed, and Babel, that god so ardently worshipped by hostesses, shed his full effulgence over the diners. Thibet and the Chaldæans easily led on to astronomy; astronomy to the observatory at Chicago, which occasioned a sudden and thrilling silence; and from the United States it was but a step to fiscal problems in which all but the cabinet ministers laid down incontrovertible opinions. Then golf let them into the circle again; and the story of a golfer being carried off the first tee after a futile drive, and expiring an hour later from an operation for appendicitis, while his wife was being confined, was charmingly to the point. In fact, the desultory rapidity of conversation left nothing to be desired, and all was due to Lady Sunningdale’s inimitable plan of talking shop to the shop-keepers.
Later, Martin played, there was Bridge, and Lord Sunningdale, as usual, went to sleep, and, on awaking, revoked, subsequently explaining the revoke to the satisfaction of everybody but his partner, who remained dissatisfied to the last. Women took bed-candles, men gravitated to the smoking-room, though, since every one had previously smoked in the drawing-room, this seemed unnecessary. But, the fact is one without exception, men left alone leave drawing-rooms.