It might be doubted whether Lady Rossiter found cause for thankfulness in the presence of her great friend when he eventually joined the tea-party, his face black with scowls at the interruption to his work and suffused with shyness at her complacent greeting.
Miss Marchrose poured out tea and talked to Julian, who sat next her, and Mark, to whom self-consciousness was unknown, handed plates of bread-and-butter and cut up a small plum-cake and endeavoured to win smiles from the recalcitrant Fuller. Edna, her voice modulated to careful sweetness, manufactured kindly conversation.
But Mr. Fuller, his elbows very much squared and his bullet head thrust well forward, devoted his energies to the rapid demolition of his meal, and replied monosyllabically to Mark's kindly derision and Lady Rossiter's benevolences alike. His shyness, however, appeared to place him under a mysterious compulsion to recite aloud, in an inward voice, any scrap of printed matter upon which his eye chanced to fall, regardless of relevance. This necessity, though common enough in any assembly of not too congenial strangers, did not add to continuity of discourse.
As thus, when Lady Rossiter moved a pot of plum jam towards him, saying that she was so sorry that the injunction to make no difference had not been attended to, Mr. Fuller was constrained to reply in a very severe way, No; he never ate jam—Three gold medals at the Paris and Vienna Exhibitions—but it was there every day, he believed.
"It is there, because I like it," said Miss Marchrose. "They never had anything but bread-and-butter till I came."
Edna's ever-ready eyebrows went up, but she still addressed herself exclusively to Fairfax Fuller.
"Plum jam is quite my favourite. I never really care for the expensive varieties, or think them a bit better than the others."
"Inspection invited at the manufactories." Fuller pursued his way, almost turning the jam-pot upside down in an apparently agonised search for further literature.
"Jam on bread-and-butter is quite a luxury. Julian and I never get it at home," Lady Rossiter persevered.
"London, Edinburgh, and at Sharplington in Essex," said Fuller, without looking at her.