The mulligatawny and the cod with oyster-sauce had already been served by the two cap-and-aproned wenches, whom the rear-admiral declared to be "a damned sight better than any heavy-handed son of a gun who smoked a fellow's cigars, drank his port, and did as little work as the old bumboat-woman of Portsmouth."
Rear-Admiral Billy was enjoying himself. His jovial eyes, a little red-rimmed with age under the heavy brown thatch of his hair, kept glancing round at "his two colts and their fillies" (one is, alas! forced to modify a good many of the admiral's pet expressions) and at that "jolly little piece in the No. 5 rig," Aliette's sister. His trim beard, grayed only at the extremities, kept wagging accompaniment to Aliette's account of the run; the course of which his hairy-backed hands were trying to trace, in bread and salt, on the table-cloth.
"'Spose you funked as usual, Adrian," rumbled the old man across the enormous table. "God knows what I've ever done to deserve a son in the church."
The Rev. Adrian, in clerical evening dress, only laughed at his father's criticism; but the Rev. Adrian's Margery fired up in defense of her spouse.
"Adrian's seen more active service than most men of his cloth," began the little aquiline, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and darkly determined woman, who dressed (when natural circumstances permitted her--as they did not at the moment) with the severe precision of unadorned royalty.
Aliette continued her low-voiced description of the day's run; Hector tried explaining to an attentive Mollie the exact difference between a disbarred barrister and a solicitor who has been struck off the rolls; the cap-and-aproned wenches set an enormous joint of mutton before the host, who always insisted on carving with his own hands; and dinner proceeded.
To Hector Brunton's wife the dullish meal was less unpleasant than her anticipation of it. She liked her father-in-law--though his occasional coarseness always jarred her sensitive mind. She appreciated her sister's week-end visit; and anticipated with some pleasure the family talk which would precede their going to bed. But above all, she liked being away from the constraining intimacy of her home with Hector.
Recently Hector had been growing more and more difficult to deny. She caught him looking at her now, sideways across the vast white of the table-cloth. Vaguely she felt sorry for him. His cold eyes almost held an appeal. "Look round," they seemed to be saying, "it isn't so bad; really it isn't so bad, this little family party. Can't we make it up, you and I?"
"Poor Hector!" she thought. "He's a very simple person. He doesn't understand"; and checked thought, not abruptly, but with the same quiet firmness she had applied to Miracle that morning.
For Aliette never posed, even to herself. She was the very antithesis of the usual misunderstood married woman; so far, the mere thought of a compensating lover had never entered her head. All that happened afterward--and sometimes, looking back, it seems to her as though it all began from that chance remark of Adrian's--happened of its own volition. At the moment Adrian spoke she was just an ordinary woman, who had married an ordinary man in the expectation of a home and children, found him out in various infidelities, and decided--after due thought--that she could no longer pay his physical price for the dwindling possibility of motherhood.