Howard laid down his maize-cobs. The letter lay at Margaret’s side; everybody looked at it. Mrs. Prinsep, in her shrewd Scotch way, glanced at her neighbours, and saw that there was something wrong. “There is something wrong somewhere,” she said to herself. Olivia, looking at Perrin and at her husband, wondered if the heat had been too much for them. Their faces were so very curious. It struck her that the talk had gone to pieces. The host, waiting for her head to turn, so that he might expound his new science to her, held his peace.
“Everybody’s waiting for you, Charles,” she added.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Prinsep, guessing that Margaret disliked Olivia’s prompting. “Captain Margaret will tell us all the news.”
Captain Margaret asked Mrs. Prinsep if he might hand her a sapadillo.
“I’m anxious to hear the news,” she answered. “No, thank you.”
“Oh,” said Margaret lightly, as he put the letter in his pocket, “I won’t read the letter during dinner. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mrs. Prinsep, how you keep domestic servants here, with such a scarcity of white women.”
“I’d rather hear what the letter says,” she answered, “than talk about servants. We get so little news here from England.”
“I don’t understand the craving for news,” said Perrin. “One carries the world in one’s head.”
“You must want a big head to do that,” said Mrs. Prinsep.
“It doesn’t matter what size it is, so long as it’s empty. Why read letters and gazettes when one can read imaginative work?”