The dinner at the Rosery was all that was pleasant and desirable, saving that Doctor Scales felt rather disappointed in having to take in Aunt Sophia. He was not a ladies’ man, he said, when talking of such matters, and would have been better content to have gone in alone. He was not much pleased either at being very near Mr Arthur Prayle, to whom he at once took a more decided dislike, being, as he acknowledged to himself, exceedingly ready to form antipathies, and prejudiced in the extreme.
“Ah,” he said to himself, “one ought to be satisfied;” and he glanced round the prettily decorated table, and uttered a sigh of satisfaction as the sweet scents of the garden floated in through the open window. Then he uttered another similar sigh, for there were scents in the room more satisfying to a hungry man.
“Perhaps you’d like the window shut, auntie?” said Sir James.
“No, my dear; it would be a shame: the weather is so fine.—You don’t think it will give me rheumatism in the shoulder, do you, doctor?”
“No, madam, certainly not,” said Scales. “You are not over-heated.”
“Then we will have it open,” said Aunt Sophia decisively.
“Do you consider that rheumatism always comes from colds, Doctor Scales?” said Arthur Prayle, bending forward from his seat beside his hostess, and speaking in a bland smooth tone.
“That fellow’s mouth seems to me as if it must be lined with black velvet,” thought the doctor. “Bother him! if I believed in metempsychosis, I should say he would turn into a black Tom-cat. He purrs and sets up his back, and seems as if he must have a tail hidden away under his coat.—No, decidedly not,” he said aloud. “I think people often suffer from a kind of rheumatic affection due to errors of diet.”
“Dear me! how strange.”
“Then we shall have Aunt Sophia laid up,” said Sir James, “for she is always committing errors in diet.”