Lewis expected that her three sons, the Old Jewry bankers, would be there, but none of them turned up. Sir Solon Apostolatos, the old father, came down at last in a velvet dinner jacket, preceded, as the Rhodes hangings over the door lifted, by a fiercely hooked nose kept in leash by the chain of his eyeglasses; he had bat ears, a close-cropped beard and protruding eyes like those of the gold masks of Mycenæ, and he wore a skull cap in the middle of his very scanty white hair.
In spite of his courteous greeting and the traditions of ancient Greek hospitality, Lewis summed him up as being mean, eccentric and a bully.
"Please accept my compliments," he said.
He pretended to be deaf to add to his authority. Irene offered him her slender cheek. He treated her harshly, as he did his daughters.
He made no allowance for youth, declared that everything easy or pleasant was wicked, upbraided his daughters for forgetting birthdays, for thinking themselves his equals and for living for nothing but pleasure, even though they were both over forty and lived like nuns. He also reproached them for being old maids, having done everything possible to prevent them from marrying; they surrounded him with fear, respect and admiration. He had once had a wife whom he killed by his bad treatment of her. With Oriental jealousy, when he had to leave her to go to the Bank he used to take down the unfortunate woman's hair and shut it in a chest of drawers, taking away the key.
They sat at an overburdened table round which an old butler carried out all sorts of funereal rites like those of the Orthodox Church, wandering about as they wander round the churches in Athens act Easter. In the centre of the table stood a bowl full of flowers whose object was not so much to decorate the table as to hide the guests from one another, thereby minimising the number of dreadful disputes and the threats of expulsion from the house that devastated the family dinner at every other course.
The food was plentiful. Oriental and heavy. But the old father, Solon, was only interested in the china on which it was served.
"And now," he said, addressing Lewis and rubbing himself to get the uric acid out of his joints, "you are going to have..."
Lewis waited expectantly for a tale of some noble vintage.
" ... my blue and gold Vincennes; there are only seventeen pieces left. Prince V—— has two and there are three at South Kensington; I have got the other twelve, which you see here."