"Don't you think he's got a sort of a far-away look? Especially about the mouth and nose?"
Whether it was from being stared at or for some other reason, but by this time Mr. Rickman had certainly become a little distant. He was not getting on well with anybody or anything, not even with Mrs. Downey's excellent dinner, nor yet with the claret, an extra ordered for his private drinking, always to Mrs. Downey's secret trepidation. She gave a half-timid, half-tender look at him and signalled to her ladies to withdraw. She herself remained behind, superintending the removal of the feast; keeping a motherly eye, too, on the poor boy and his claret. Ever since that one dreadful Sunday morning when she had found him asleep in full evening dress upon his bedroom floor, Mrs. Downey was always expecting to see him drop under the table. He had never done it yet, but there was no knowing when he mightn't.
Whatever the extent of Mr. Rickman's alleged intemperance, his was not the vice of the solitary drinker, and to-night the claret was nearly all drunk by Spinks and Soper. It had the effect of waking in the commercial gentleman the demon of sociability that slept.
What Mr. Soper wanted to know was whether Rickman could recommend 'Armouth as a holiday resort? Could he tell him of any first-class commercial hotel or boarding-house down there? To which Rickman replied that he really couldn't tell him anything at all.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Downey, peering over the edge of the table-cloth she was helping to fold. "Perhaps he has his reasons."
The claret had made Mr. Soper not only sociable but jocose. "Reasons? That's a new name for 'em. If he don't want more than one at a time, I wish he'd introduce the rest of 'em to me."
"I daresay he would be very happy, if he thought you would understand them, Mr. Soper."
"Understand 'em? Why, I don't suppose they talk Greek."
"Ryzors," said Spinks indignantly, "could give 'em points if they did. He speaks the language."
Mr. Soper replied that in that case perhaps Mr. Rickman would oblige him with the Greek for "crumby bits."