"You might have stayed on," I suggested, passing him the sandwiches, "and made the recitation competitive."
"Competitive," he remarked, choosing a ripe, red disk of tomato, flanked with thin circles of bread, and biting into it reflectively, "calls for numbers. I don't enjoy being part of a mob-scene, or a mass-meeting."
"Here comes the Meistersänger," I said, as Wright came up the steps, with Mercedes unnecessarily on his arm.
Selecting chairs, cups, plates and food, our guests joined us around the wicker tea-wagon.
"He is not a nice young man at all," said Mercedes frankly, exhibiting a rather clever little pastel of herself, "this Wright. He says to me the most beautiful poetry, so sad and so lovely, all about unrequited love and dead girls floating in moonlit pools, and when, touched to the heart, I weep a little, he laughs and says it is wonderful how much tragedy one can turn out at fifty cents a line!"
She opened ocular fire on her host as she spoke, and Bill responded nicely.
"I'm sure," he said gravely, "that Wright will have plenty of happier inspiration now."
And said Wright to me, under his breath,
"In all justice, one must concede her a certain amount of beauty. I don't think she's going to look like her mother after all."
"Whispering's rude," said Mercedes severely, "isn't it, Billy?"