“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby. “Had you come down to say good night, my dear? We are having a rather—rather technical talk.”
“Sounds like it, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, and went round and sat on the arm of his chair for a moment.
“Good night, little Daddy,” she said.
Reflective moment.
“I think this Tumbridge is going to suit me,” said Mr. Preemby.
“I hope it will, little Daddy. Good night.”
§ 7
Christina Alberta’s first evening at the Petunia Boarding House has been described with some particularity because it is a sample of all the still and uneventful evenings that seemed to lie before Mr. Preemby there. It impressed her as an unfathomable enormity of uneventfulness in which nothing harmful or disturbing could conceivably occur to him. The last remote possibility of imaginative disturbance seemed to remove itself next day when Mrs. Bone announced to the whiskered gentleman’s wife that she and her husband were off to Bath on the morrow: they were in luck it seemed; they had got the exact rooms for the winter in the exact boarding house they had always had their eyes on. “Tunbridge seems so bleak,” she said. “After Burmah.”
The dinner was like the previous dinner; the Birds of Passage had gone and Mr. Preemby astonished himself, Christina Alberta, the chubby maid and the assembled company by demanding whether it was possible to send out (h’rrmp) for a bottle or flask of Chianti. “It’s an Italian wine,” said Mr. Preemby to inform and help the chubby maid in her inquiries. But there was no Chianti on the wine-list supplied, and after a conversation markedly reminiscent of that of the Birds of Passage overnight, the Preemby table was stocked with a bottle of Australian Burgundy and, at Christina Alberta’s request, a bottle of mineral water.
After this display of initiative, self-assertion and social derring-do, Mr. Preemby did little but h’rrmp throughout the rest of the meal.