Since the day when fate had shipwrecked us at the end of the Temple Braney shrubbery, and flung us, dripping, into the bosoms of the McRorys, we had been the victims of an indissoluble friendship with the family. This fulfilled itself in many ways.
Gratitude, what is known as Common Gratitude (which is merely a hollow compliance with the voice of conscience), impelled us to lunch Mr. and Mrs. McRory, heavily and elaborately (but without any one to meet them); to invite the whole family to a lawn-tennis party (and the whole family came); and, at other people's tennis parties, to fawn upon them (when it was no longer possible to elude them). It was a despicable position, and had I at all foreseen, when the picnic sank at Temple Braney pier, that the result would have been dinner-parties, I should unhesitatingly have left Philippa to drown.
The intimacies imposed by Common Gratitude had, under the healing hand of time, become less acute, and might, indeed, have ceased to affect us, had not fate again intervened, and cemented the family friendship in the most public way possible. There befell a Harvest Festival in Skebawn Church, with a Bishop, and an Anthem, and a special collection. To it the McRorys, forsaking their own place of worship, came in power, and my wife, very superfluously, indicated to Mrs. McRory a seat in our pew. The pew is a front one, and Mrs. McRory became at once a figure-head to the rest of the congregation—a buxom figure-head, upholstered tightly in royal blue satin, that paled the ineffectual fires of the pulpit dahlias, and shouted in a terrible major chord with the sunflowers in the east window. She creaked mysteriously and rhythmically with every breath; a large gold butterfly, poised on an invisible spring, quivered and glittered above her bonnet. It was while waiting for the service to begin that Philippa was inspired to whisper to Mrs McRory some information, quite immaterial, connected with the hymns. The next moment I perceived that Mrs. McRory's butterfly had fixed its antennæ into some adjunct of my wife's hat that was at once diaphanous and sinewy, with the result that the heads of the two ladies were locked together. A silent struggle ensued; the butterfly's grappling-irons held, so also did the hat-trimming, and Philippa and Mrs. McRory remained brow to brow in what seemed to be a prolonged embrace. At this point Philippa showed signs of collapse; she said that Mrs. McRory's nose, glowing like a ruby within two inches of her own, made her hysterical. I affected unconsciousness, while my soul thirsted for an axe with which to decapitate one or both of the combatants, and subsequently to run amok among the congregation, now, as the poet says, "abashlessly abandoned to delight." The butterfly's vitals slowly uncoiled, and were drawn out into a single yet indomitable strand of gold wire; the Bishop was imminent, when a female McRory in the pew behind (known to the Fancy as "Larkie") intervened with what were, I believe, a pair of manicure scissors, and the incident closed.
It was clear that our blood-brotherhood with the McRorys was foreordained and predestined. We evaded two invitations to dinner, but a third was inescapable, even though an alarming intimacy was foreshadowed by the request that we should come "in a very quiet way."
"Do they expect us to creep in in tennis shoes?" I demanded.
"I think it only means a black tie," said Philippa, with the idea that she was soothing me.
"If I have to go to a McRory Free-and-Easy, I shall not act as such," I returned, slamming myself into my dressing-room, and dragging forth ceremonial attire.
As, with a docility that I was far from feeling, I followed my wife into the drawing-room at Temple Braney, and surveyed the semicircle of McRorys and unknown notabilities (summarised as "Friends from Dublin") that silently awaited us, I felt that neither freedom nor ease would be my lot. But few things in life are quite as bad as one expects them to be—always excepting sea-sickness. In its dreary circuit of the room, my eye met that of my old friend Miss Bobby Bennett, of the Curranhilty Hunt, niece of its Master, and consultant and referee in all its affairs. My friendship with Miss Bennett was of an ideal nature; when we met, which was seldom, we were delighted to see one another; in the intervals we forgot one another with, I felt sure, an equal completeness. Her social orbit was incalculable; she resembled a fox of whom I heard an earth-stopper say that you "couldn't tell any certain place where he wouldn't puck out." Whether it was at Punchestown, or at a Skebawn Parish tea, or judging cakes and crochet at an Agricultural Show, wherever she appeared it was with the same air of being on top of the situation and of extracting the utmost from it.
To me befell the onerous task of taking the Lady of the House in to dinner, but upon my other hand sat Miss Bennett (squired by a Friend from Dublin of apparently negligible quality), and before I had recovered from the soup—a hell-broth of liquid mustard that called itself mulligatawny—I found that to concentrate upon her was no more than was expected of me by both ladies. Mrs. McRory's energies were indeed fully engrossed by the marshalling of a drove of heated females, who hurried stertorously and spasmodically round the table, driven as leaves before the wind by fierce signals from their trainer. Opposite to me sat that daughter of the house whose manicure scissors had terminated the painful episode of the butterfly. I had always maintained that she was the prettiest of the McRorys, and it was evident that Irving, the new District Inspector of R.I.C., who sat beside her, shared my opinion. He was a serious, lanky young man, and at such moments as he found himself deprived of Miss McRory's exclusive attention, he accepted no alternative, and devoted himself austerely to his food.
Miss Bennett's intention was, I presently discovered, to hunt with Flurry Knox's hounds on the following day: she had brought over a horse, and it became clear to me that her secondary intention was to return without it.