He said that with the air of implying: Bookshops are not ordinary shops.
Speed bowed; the Head went on boomingly: "And she is, I think I may venture to say, my daughter's greatest friend. Eh?"
He addressed the monosyllable to the girl with a touch of shrewdness: she replied quietly: "I don't know." The three words were spoken in that rare tone in which they simply mean nothing but literally what they say.
In the dining-room they sat in the following formation: Dr. and Mrs. Ervine at the head and foot respectively; Helen and Clare together at one side, and Speed opposite them at the other. The dining-room was a cold forlorn-looking apartment in which the dim incandescent light seemed to accomplish little more than to cast a dull glitter of obscurity on the oil-paintings that hung, ever so slightly askew, on the walls. A peculiar incongruity in it struck Speed at once, though the same might never have occurred to anybody else: the minute salt and pepper-boxes on the table possessed a pretty feminine daintiness which harmonised ill with the huge mahogany sideboard. The latter reminded Speed of the board-room of a City banking-house. It was as if, he thought, the Doctor and his wife had impressed their personalities crudely and without compromise; and as if those personalities were so diametrically different that no fusing of the two into one was ever possible. Throughout the meal he kept looking first to his left, at Mrs. Ervine, and then to his right at the Doctor, and wondering at what he felt instinctively to be a fundamental strangeness in their life together.
Potter, assisted by a speckle-faced maid, hovered assiduously around, and the Doctor assisted occasionally by his wife, hovered no less assiduously around the conversation, preventing it from lapsing into such awkward silences as would throw into prominence the continual hissing of the gas and his own sibilant ingurgitation of soup. The Doctor talked rather loudly and ponderously, and with such careful and scrupulous qualifications of everything he said that one had the impressive sensation that incalculable and mysterious issues hung upon his words; Mrs. Ervine's remarks were short and pithy, sometimes a little cynical.
The Doctor seemed to fear that he had given Speed a wrong impression of Miss Harrington. "I'm sure Mr. Speed will be surprised when I tell him that he can have the honour of purchasing his Times from you each morning, Clare," he said, lapping up the final spoonful of soup and bestowing a satisfied wipe with his napkin on his broad wet lips.
Clare said: "I should think Mr. Speed would prefer to have it delivered."
Mrs. Ervine said: "Perhaps Mr. Speed doesn't take the Times, either."
Speed looked across to Clare with a humorous twist of the corners of the mouth and said: "You can book me an order for the Telegraph if you like, Miss Harrington."
"With pleasure, Mr. Speed. Any Sunday paper?"