“Extremely comfortable,” said Mr. Preemby, sitting down with much creaking in a basket arm-chair.
Christina Alberta sat on a glass-topped table and lit a cigarette. She saw those two hours stretching before her, and she wanted to scream.
The chubby maid brought coffee and seemed gently surprised at Christina Alberta’s cigarette. Whisperings off stage. Then Miss Emily became dimly visible through the bead curtain at the end of the passage, hovering. She vanished again and Christina Alberta finished her cigarette in peace. Mr. Preemby drank up his coffee. Pause. Christina Alberta swung her legs rhythmically. Then she slid off the table to her feet.
“Daddy,” she said, “let’s go into the sitting-room and see if anything is happening there.”
§ 5
In the Boarding Houses of the past the common dining-table was the social centre where people met and mind clashed upon and polished mind. But the spirit of aloofness, the separate table system, has changed all that, and now it is in the smoking-room or the sitting-room that the vestiges of social intercourse, advances, retreats, coquettings, exchanges, games and jests are to be found. But the company of the Petunia Boarding House was not in a state of social fusion. The only coalescence was a conversation. The wife of the gentleman from the Burmese forests had secured an arm-chair by the side of the fire-place, and she was describing in a low whisper the numerous servants she had had in Burmah, to the cheerful wife and the younger Miss Solbé who was knitting. The Miss Solbé with the spectacles had fortified herself behind a table on the other side of the fire and was engaged meticulously with a very elaborate Patience. The gentleman with the side-whiskers sat rigidly on one of the sofas, behind a copy of the Times, while his daughter sat at a table close at hand and also threaded her way through a Patience. The Birds of Passage, after inquiries about movies and music-halls, had gone out.
Nobody took the slightest notice of Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta. The two stood for some moments in the middle of the room, and then panic came upon Mr. Preemby. A dishonourable panic so that he threw his daughter to these silent, motionless wolves.
“H’rrmp,” he said. “I think my dear, I will go to the smoking-room. I think I will go and smoke. There are some illustrated papers over there on the bookcase for you if you care to look at them.”
Christina Alberta walked over to the low bookcase and Mr. Preemby departed, h’rrmping.
She stood pretending an interest in the illustrated jokes and in the portraits of actresses and society people in the Sketch and Tatler. Out of the tail of her eye she surveyed those fellow-guests of hers, and with a negligent ear she collected the gist of Mrs. Bone’s dissertation upon the servant question in Burmah. “They will plant the whole family upon you if they can—uncles and cousins even. Before you know where you are....