"Oh, bother your hands and your hair; come along. I'm going to the play—gallery—with Bruce Collier, to the Coliseum, so I shan't have to dress, but I've very little time."
Mrs. Walbridge was a careful housekeeper, but things will go wrong sometimes in every house, and this was one of those occasions for her. She had a new cook whom she ought, she knew, to have superintended, but the call of her book had been too loud and she had forgotten all about dinner. The soup was lumpy and luke-warm, and the leg of mutton quivering and purple. Paul watched it as she cut the first slice (she always did the carving), and threw down his napkin angrily.
"Raw meat—that's really too much! I'll go to the club and get a sandwich."
Tears rose to her eyes. "Oh, Paul, I am sorry, very sorry," she cried, "and I don't wonder you're annoyed, but don't go. Let me make you a Welsh rabbit."
He shook his head and rose. "No, no. I'd rather go."
"I—I—it was my fault," she went on. "I got so interested in my book that I utterly forgot dinner."
At the door he turned and looked back at her pitilessly.
"Your book! If your books were worth while there'd be some excuse for artistic absent-mindedness, but considering the stuff you turn out, I shouldn't think such mundane details as soup and mutton need be so infinitely beneath you."