"Does he drink?"
"Like a fish—but his capacity to drink is only to be estimated by cubic space—the amount he can hold. His brain and constitution have been educated up to alcohol. Nothing can touch him further."
"Colonel Blathwayt, we want you to give us the 'Wonderful One-Horse Shay,' and after that, the Baron is going to recite 'James Lee's Wife,' said Mrs. Tregonell, while her guests ranged themselves into an irregular semicircle, and the useful Miss Bridgeman placed a prie-dieu chair in a commanding position for the reciter to lean upon gracefully, or hug convulsively in the more energetic passages of his recitation.
"Everybody seems to have gone mad," thought Mr. Tregonell, as he seated himself and surveyed the assembly, all intent and expectant.
His wife sat near the piano with de Cazalet bending over her, talking in just that slightly lowered voice which gives an idea of confidential relations, yet may mean no more than a vain man's desire to appear the accepted worshipper of a beautiful woman. Never had Leonard seen Angus Hamleigh's manner so distinctively attentive as was the air of this Hibernian adventurer.
"Just the last man whose attentions I should have supposed she would tolerate," thought Leonard; "but any garbage is food for a woman's vanity."
The "Wonderful One-Horse Shay" was received with laughter and delight. Dopsy and Mopsy were in raptures. "How could a horrid American have written anything so clever? But then it was Colonel Blathwayt's inimitable elocution which gave a charm to the whole thing. The poem was poor enough, no doubt, if one read it to oneself. Colonel Blathwayt was adorably funny."
"It's a tremendous joke, as you do it," said Mopsy, twirling her sunflower fan—a great yellow flower, like the sign of the Sun Inn, on a black satin ground. "How delightful to be so gifted."
"Now for 'James Lee's Wife,'" said the Colonel, who accepted the damsel's compliments for what they were worth. "You'll have to be very attentive if you want to find out what the poem means; for the Baron's delivery is a trifle spasmodic."
And now de Cazalet stepped forward with a vellum-bound volume in his hand, dashed back his long sleek hair with a large white hand, glanced at the page, coughed faintly, and then began in thick, hurried accents, which kept getting thicker and more hurried as the poem advanced. It was given, not in lines, but in spasms, panted out, till at the close the Baron sank exhausted, breathless, like the hunted deer when the hounds close round him.