Such a thing was quite impossible, of course.
The four men sat down, more closely grouped together than before.
The coffee, which had been served by a footman, before the ladies had disappeared, was a pretence in cups no bigger than plovers' eggs. Amberley liked the modern affectation of his women guests remaining at the table and sharing the joys of the after-dinner-hour. But now, the butler entered with larger cups and a tray of liqueurs, while the host himself poured out a glass of port and handed the old-fashioned cradle in which the bottle lay to young Dickson Ingworth on his right.
That curly-headed youth, who was a Pembroke man and knew the ritual of the Johnsonian Common Room at Oxford, gravely filled his own glass and pushed the bottle to Herbert Toftrees, who was in the vacated seat of his hostess, and pouring a little Perrier water into a tumbler.
The butler lifted the wicker-work cradle with care, passed behind Toftrees, and set it before Gilbert Lothian.
Lothian looked at it for a moment and then made a decisive movement of his head.
"Thank you, no," he said, after a second's consideration, and in a voice that was slightly high-pitched but instinct with personality—it could never have been mistaken for any one else's voice, for instance—"I think I will have a whiskey and soda."
Toftrees, at the end of the table, within two feet of Lothian, gave a mental start. The popular novelist was rather confused.
A year ago no one had heard of Gilbert Lothian—that was not a name that counted in any way. He had been a sort of semi-obscure journalist who signed what he wrote in such papers as would print him. There were a couple of novels to his name which had obtained a sort of cult among minor people, and, certainly, some really eminent weeklies had published very occasional but signed reviews.
As far as Herbert Toftrees could remember—and his jealous memory was good—Lothian had always been rather small beer until a year or so back.