Instinctively Arthur looked up the table at Mr Kenyon.
He was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasping the arms, his eyes were wide open, but stared unseeingly down the room. He looked like a man in a trance; it flashed into Arthur's mind that he looked like a dreaming god.
The servants were standing now by the sideboard, doing nothing. And for perhaps a couple of minutes the progress of the dinner was suspended. Every one sat in silence and waited until the dreaming god smiled and leaned forward again in his chair. He came back to his world with no sign of disturbance or shock. He was to all appearances unaware of the interval that had passed. And immediately, with a quiet inevitableness the subdued sounds of footsteps and low conversation crept back into the room.
Arthur remembered the remark of the chauffeur who had driven him from the station. What was it he had said? "It's as if he were sound asleep with his eyes wide open." That explanation did not satisfy Arthur's feeling for physiological probability. He wondered if it might be a case of petit mal, minor epilepsy?
He looked round the table and thought that he could detect a general air of demure resignation in the bowed faces around him. Ninety-one! They were all remembering that the old man was ninety-one. Anything might happen at that age!
He glanced across the table again and saw that Eleanor was watching him. He smiled at her, but the smile with which she answered him had no warmth in it. It was nothing but a polite response.
How jolly she looked in that soft white dress!
He returned to the enjoyment of his dinner, which seemed to him to be the best he had ever eaten. It was a simple dinner: soup, entrée, a saddle of mutton, sweet, savory, and dessert; but it was perfectly cooked and served. The clear soup had had wine in it, and a flavour that was at once delicate and strong; the entrée had had just that touch of piquancy that gave one an appetite for the joint. And the saddle was a joint to remember, so firm and tender, its richness nicely mitigated by the new potatoes and green peas that accompanied it. Arthur had a palate and could appreciate these good things. Also, although he had had a limited experience of wine, he knew that the claret was no ordinary vintage. It had an aroma like fruit. At dessert there were magnificent strawberries. Arthur found a justification for the theory that such things as new peas, potatoes, and strawberries taste better in the third week of May than at the end of June. It was, he decided, because they brought a foretaste of summer, and the anticipation has always some exquisite flavour that is lacking in the present reality. He was pleased with this conceit and tried it on Miss Kenyon.
She regarded him thoughtfully. "It may be true when one is under forty," she said. "After that, one prefers to live in the present."
He was emboldened by the claret to press the old psychological truism to its conclusion. "And later still there comes a time, I believe, when one lives chiefly in the past," he hazarded.