By ten minutes past seven, the sounds in the passage had ceased—the guests had all come. In Mrs. Bindle's circle it was customary to take literally the time mentioned in the invitation, and to apologise for even a few minutes' lateness.
In order that the Montagues should not become confused with the Capulets, Bindle had taken the precaution of asking his own friends to come to the back door. He had added that the beer would be in the kitchen.
Mrs. Bindle had always been immovable in her determination that Bindle's "low public-house companions" should not have an opportunity of "insulting" her friends from the Alton Road Chapel.
With Mrs. Bindle the first quarter-of-an-hour of her rare social gatherings was always a period of anguish and uncertainty. Although everybody knew everybody else, all were constrained and ill-at-ease.
Miss Lamb kept twirling her rolled-gold bracelet round her lace-mittened wrist, smiling vacantly the while. Miss Death seemed unable to keep her hard grey eyes, set far too closely together, from the refreshment sideboard, whilst Mrs. Dykes, a tiny woman in a fawn skirt and a coral-pink blouse, was continually feeling the back of her head, as if anticipating some catastrophe to her hair.
Mrs. Hearty, who began in a bright blue satin blouse, and ended in canary-coloured stockings thrust into cloth shoes with paste buckles, beat her breast and struggled for breath. Mr. Hearty was negative, conversationally he was a bankrupt, whilst Mrs. Stitchley was garrulous and with a purpose. She was bent upon talking down the consciousness that she had not been invited.
Her excuse for coming, at least the excuse she made to herself, was that of chaperoning her daughter, a near-sighted, shapeless girl, with no chest and a muddy complexion, who never had and never would require such an attention.
The others were just neuter, except Mr. Thimbell, whose acute nervousness and length of limb rendered him a nuisance.
Mrs. Bindle was conscious that she was looking her best in a dark blue alpaca dress, with a cream-coloured lace yoke, which modesty had prompted her to have lined with the material of the dress. To her, the display of any portion of her person above the instep, or below the feminine equivalent of the "Adam's apple," was a tribute to the Mammon of Unrighteousness, and her dressmaker was instructed accordingly.
She moved about the room, trying to make everyone feel at home, and succeeding only in emphasising the fact that they were all out.