She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with large, fishish eyes at the caviare before her.
"How do you get that, for instance?" he asked.
"Oh!" she answered: "If it wasn't my husband's doing it would look like ostentation. I'd find it ostentatious for myself." She found a smile, radiant, yet muted. "He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice too. It's such pretty stuff . . . and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction. . . . All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast before ten."
She didn't want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she couldn't, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly running phrases—as if out of books she had read!—of the smaller man.
"Ah, but it isn't," Tietjens said, "ostentation. It's the great Tradition. You mustn't ever forget that your husband's Breakfast Duchemin of Magdalen."
He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he meant to be agreeable.
"Sometimes I wish I could," she said. "He doesn't get anything out of it himself. He's ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious . . . for Saturdays."
Tietjens said:
"I know."
She exclaimed—and almost with sharpness: