"I say he made a settlement on her, dum casta et sola, of course. Whilst she remained chaste and alone!"
Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on his feet, panting and delighted:
"Chaste!" He shouted. "Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion in the word . . .'" He surveyed the opulent broadness of his tablecloth; it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford Movement voice: "But chastity . . ."
Mrs. Wannop suddenly said:
"Oh!" and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her and said:
"You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned than my poor readers would care for . . ." Mr. Horsley had been preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a description of an article he had been writing about the Mosella of Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, said to her as loudly as he could:
"I've got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if you'll . . ."
The completely deaf Miss Fox—who had had her training by writing—remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin:
"I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of minute insects. . . ."
"When my revered preceptor," Mr. Duchemin thundered on "drove away in the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: 'We will live like the blessed angels!' How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials . . ."