Fusby threw open a door and announced loudly, "Sir George and Lady
Campion, Miss Bax, Mr Gallup."
They were the last of the guests.
For a little while he was less conscious of his dream. This light, bright room with white panelled walls and furniture covered with gay chintzes, soft blurred chintz in palest pinks and greens, with pictures in oval frames, and people, ordinary people that he had seen before, all talking and laughing together. This was not the Redmarley that he knew, grave and beautiful and old.
This was not the Redmarley of his dream. It came back to him as Mrs Ffolliot gave him her hand in welcome, presenting him to her husband and one or two other people. It left him as she turned away and Grantly came forward and greeted him. Grantly, tall and irreproachably well dressed, cheerful withal and quite at his ease.
Sir George had pulled Mary into the very middle of the room and held her at arm's length with laughing comments. How could men find the courage for that sort of thing? He heard him ask what she had done with her sash, and then Mrs Ffolliot said, "I think you know my daughter, Mr Gallup; will you take her in to dinner?"
And once more he was well in the middle of his dream, for he found himself in the corridor he knew, side by side with Mary, part of a procession moving towards the dining-room.
Her hand was on his arm, but the exquisite moment was a little marred by the discovery that she was quite an inch taller than he.
Eloquent had been to a good many public dinners; he had even dined with certain Cabinet Ministers, but always when there were only men. He had never yet dined with people of the Ffolliots' class in this intimate, friendly way, and he found everything a little different from what he expected. He had read very little fiction, and such mental pictures as he had evolved were drawn from his inner consciousness. As always, he wondered how they contrived to be so gay, to talk such nonsense, and to laugh at it. Seated between Mary and witty Mrs Ward, whose husband was one of his ardent supporters in the county, he did his best to join in the general conversation, but he found it hard. Miss Bax, whose premonition regarding her fate was justified, seemed to have overcome her objection to cadets. She and Grantly were just opposite to him, and he noticed with regret that Grantly was drinking champagne. It would have been better, Eloquent thought, if the boy had abstained altogether after his experience at the election. Mary, too, drank champagne, but Eloquent condoned this weakness in her case, she drank so little. Everyone drank champagne except Sir George, who preferred whisky, and Eloquent himself, who drank Apollinaris.
"Do you suffer from rheumatism?" Mary asked innocently. "Do you think it would hurt you once in a way?"
"I am not in the least rheumatic," Eloquent protested, "but I have never tasted anything intoxicating."