"Oh, dear, no! They do not wish me if I take Oswald along with me. He is in our lodgings in London. He quite misses the office in the daytime, as he cannot sleep nearly so well at home. Poor Oswald! Mr. Sydney," she said, turning to that gentleman, who had sat in silence at her side, "I thought that you always kept the table in a roar?"
"How can a man do that when he is expected to," answered Sydney, gloomily. "I am always saddest at dinner, for I know that I have been asked because there is a tradition in society that I am a wit. If I speak of the gloomiest subjects people snicker; if I am eloquent or pathetic, they roar. I am by nature rather a lyric poet than a wit—ah, you are laughing, Mrs. Carey, you are laughing. What did I tell you?"
"But, my dear Mr. Sydney, you are funny, really you are."
"I am funny because I mean to be serious," said Mr. Sydney. "In these days of the decadence of civilization if a man is in earnest, terribly in earnest, people think that he is vastly amusing. I shall try to be funny soon, to earn my wage, and people will think me dull enough then."
The poor man drank a large glass of wine and pointing at the entrée upon his plate asked:
"Mrs. Carey, can a man who expects daily to be gathered to his fathers eat a vol-au-vent of pigeons à la financière? How can it be expected? They should not tempt me with such dishes. I know that I ought not to eat them, but I cannot resist. I partake of them and I do not sleep. I have not closed my eyes for three nights."
He began to eat his vol-au-vent with the appetite of a boy of fourteen.
"Poor old fellow," whispered Mrs. Carey to Geoffrey. "He knows that he must be amusing on this visit else Jawkins will strike him off his list. It is lucky that I only have to look beautiful. It is no exertion whatever. While poor old Sydney knows that something is expected of him, and as he naturally likes to talk about statistics and his physical ailments, and as he gained his reputation as a wit from a single repartee made at a dinner twenty years ago, he finds it hard to fulfil his part. He is simply funny because he isn't. It's a strange paradox."
"It must, indeed, be a hard task, making one's self a brick without straw," answered Geoffrey. "Think of not having the luxury of being disagreeable—to be always on the rack to perpetrate a joke, Mrs. Carey."
"You did not call me Mrs. Carey when we last met," she said, reproachfully.