The Major at his end of the table devoted himself assiduously to his duties as host, seeing that glasses were filled, distributing gallant remarks among the ladies, constantly signing tickets. He was in his element; expanding, positively glowing, with hospitality.
"Another cigar, my boy? Try this brand! Take several! Fill your pockets with them. I can recommend them personally!"
There came to be several brands which he could recommend personally, several vintages as well. The waiters hovered about him like cherubim about the throne of grace, and he knew them all by name, and took an interest in their families.
This lavish generosity, Joan reflected, was the spirit which gave the old South its glamour, its traditions—to say nothing of its consequent poverty. There was something rather fine and large about the Major's apparent obliviousness of the fact that the money he spent so royally did not belong to him.
"If Effie May does not worry, why should I?" argued his daughter with herself. Her father's affairs were no longer her concern; if indeed they had ever been. But she could not help taking a certain uneasy interest in them.
"How do you happen to know enough people to invite to all these parties of yours?" she asked Effie May, aware that the Darcy family was doing rather more than its share of entertaining.
"Oh, you don't have to know people well to ask 'em to parties," explained the other innocently. "And once they eat with you, they're your friends."
"That depends upon what you give them to eat!" interjected the Major, chuckling.
It seemed a primitive conception of social relationships, but not on the whole a false one. Joan thought of the Arab and his salt....
"Food," she wrote to Stefan Nikolai, "appears to be the Tie that Binds."