“Let me read it to you,” said Arthur. He took some papers from his pocket, opened one of them, and read as follows. “To the Editor. Sir, I was once a moderate sleeper, and knew a man who slept to excess. I pleaded with him. ‘Give up this lying in bed,’ I said, ‘It will ruin your health!’ ‘You go to bed,’ he said: ‘why shouldn’t I?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I know when to get up in the morning.’ He turned away from me. ‘You sleep in your way,’ he said: ‘let me sleep in mine. Be off!’ Then I saw that to do any good with him, I must forswear sleep. From that hour I haven’t been to bed!”
Arthur folded and pocketed his paper, and passed on the newspaper-cutting. None of us dared to laugh, the red-faced man was evidently so angry. “Your parallel doesn’t run on all fours!” he snarled.
“Moderate drinkers never do so!” Arthur quietly replied. Even the stern old lady laughed at this.
“But it needs many other things to make a perfect dinner!” said Lady Muriel, evidently anxious to change the subject. “Mein Herr! What is your idea of a perfect dinner-party?”
The old man looked round smilingly, and his gigantic spectacles seemed more gigantic than ever. “A perfect dinner-party?” he repeated. “First, it must be presided over by our present hostess!”
“That, of course!” she gaily interposed. “But what else, Mein Herr?”
“I can but tell you what I have seen,” said Mein Herr, “in mine own—in the country I have traveled in.”
He paused for a full minute, and gazed steadily at the ceiling—with so dreamy an expression on his face, that I feared he was going off into a reverie, which seemed to be his normal state. However, after a minute, he suddenly began again.
“That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running-short—not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation.”
“In an English dinner-party,” I remarked, “I have never known small-talk run short!”