“About meals, of course, he’ll have them with us—except when he’s out, as I told him. I hope he’ll make simply heaps of friends here, and be out as much as ever he pleases. There won’t be any nonsense about people having to ask our leave before they invite him to lunch or tea or dine out. We shall,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, I feel sure with truth, “be only too delighted. And when he is in, I shall try and have everything as nice as possible for him. Of course we live very simply indeed, but I told him that. I felt it was much better to be perfectly candid. And of course I know nothing about wine, so I thought I’d simply make that an extra and have up what we’ve got in the cellar. It’s doing nothing there, but I’m sure Father would take some if it were actually on the table, and I expect it would do him good.”
“How is your father?”
“He’s wonderful,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with determined enthusiasm.
Her parent was then nearer eighty than seventy, and quite famous locally for the strength and the irrationality of his violent prejudices, but Mrs. Fazackerly gayly made the best of him.
It was her way to prepare strangers for an introduction to him by declaring, brightly, “Dear Father is rather a personality, you know.”
“Is he quite ready to fall in with your scheme—as to the paying guest, I mean?” Claire inquired, delicately.
“Oh, quite, I think,” Mrs. Fazackerly replied, in a slightly uncertain tone that conveyed to anyone conversant with her methods that she was adding yet another item to the long list of her deviations from perfect straightforwardness.
“Of course, Father is not a young person, exactly, and one didn’t put the whole thing before him quite as one might have done, say, a few years earlier. But he took it all very well indeed, and Captain Patch is so nice and such a thorough gentleman that I’m sure we shall have no friction at all. And really, it’s impossible not to think what a relief it will be to have anything—however little—coming in regularly once a week toward the household books.”
“It ought to be a great help.”
“After all, it needn’t really cost more to feed five people than to feed four. A joint is a joint, and we always have one a week—and sometimes two. The amount of meat that even one maid can get through is inconceivable, simply. I don’t grudge it to her for a moment, of course,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, wistfully. She looked thoughtful for a few minutes, and then said: “That does remind me of one thing that I rather wondered about. What about second helpings?”