Mr. Preemby became aware that he was walking next to Mrs. Crumb. “It was lovely to hear you talking about the New Atlantis,” she said. “I wish I had been sitting nearer.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Something very nice about Mrs. Crumb. What was it? Not so fearfully married, but married quite enough.
§ 6
Mr. Preemby thought they were going back for coffee and a little talk and then bed; he had no idea of the immense amount of evening still before him. He knew nothing as yet of the capacity for sitting up late and getting lively in the small hours possessed by this new world of young people into which Christina Alberta had led him.
And in a sort of hectic discontinuous way they were lively for hours. It became vaguely evident to Mr. Preemby that there was a periodic “day” set apart by Mrs. Crumb for evening gatherings in the studio, and that this evening he had chosen for his settling down was such an evening. Fresh people dropped in. One it seemed was a portentous arrival, he came in quite soon after the return from Poppinetti’s; he was very fat and broad, a white-faced man of forty or so, rather short of breath, with exceedingly intelligent eyes under a broad forehead and a rather loose, peevish mouth. He carried himself with the involuntary self-consciousness of a man who thinks he is pointed out. His name it seemed was Paul Lambone, and he had written all sorts of things. Everybody treated him with a faint deference. He greeted Christina Alberta with great warmth.
“How’s the newest Van?” he said, shaking her hand as though he liked it, and speaking with a singularly small voice for so ample a person. “How’s the last step in Advance?”
“You’ve got to meet my father,” said Christina Alberta.
“Has it got a father? I thought it just growed like Topsy—out of Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw and all the rest of them.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.