"Sounds a rather damp existence. I hope he will not give us all cold. Pearl, my darling, you may go in to supper now with Mr. Van Adam. Remember to drink nothing but lime-juice cordial. Mr. Van Adam, I trust you to see that my child does not touch champagne. With her tendency, it would be fatal."
The Lady Pearl flushed with vexation. To have one's mental malady drenched with lime-juice—one's soul treated like the body of a North Pole explorer—is to swallow a bitter pill. She looked at her large mother with a dawning defiance. Then she took Chloe's arm, and whispered loudly in her ear:
"I shall drink champagne to-night. I will not be treated like a"—she had nearly said "child," but, recollecting herself, substituted "gout patient." The words, tremulous and tragic, seemed to come from the very depths of a nature profound as a well. Chloe received them with the smile that had enthralled Huskinson, and whispered back:
"I'll get you two glasses."
It was innocently said, but that it was strictly judicious cannot be admitted. Such tender treatment was surely calculated to stir too wildly a character like the Lady Pearl's. And, moreover, it led her into subterfuges, for, half an hour later, when the Duchess, Mrs. Verulam, Chloe, Mr. Rodney, Mr. Ingerstall, and others, were gathered in the hall of the Unattached Club, waiting for the carriages which were to take them all "on" to the panthers, she replied to her Grace's question, "You kept to lime-juice, Pearl darling?"—"Oh, mamma, I drank two glasses," and her accompanying glance at Chloe was almost in the nature of a tiny wink.
THE BUN EMPEROR AND EMPRESS AT HOME.
As the rabbit, in moments of danger, has a passion for the little hole into which it darts with the speed of lightning, so, in moments both of safety and danger, has the properly-constituted Englishman a passion for "the home." Even the most middle-class owner of a tiny semi-detached "villa residence," looking out over a network of railway, is prepared to defend it and its clothes-line, and that mysterious barrel which always stands on end at its back-door, with his heart's best blood. Now, this is very creditable. But even a very beautiful and noble instinct may be carried too far. And the Englishman's passion for the home was, in the Bun Emperor's case, carried very far indeed.
Mr. Lite was a remarkable man in many subtle ways. Of course he had risen from the gutter. Everybody does do that nowadays. There is nothing original in the feat. His gutter was an exceedingly small, and exceedingly dingy, pie-shop in Camberwell, the sort of miscellaneous pie-shop which exhibits to the street a terrace on which things of meat and things of jam, the saveloy and the marmalade puff, air themselves side by side in a fly-blown amity of meek endurance. And it was this fact which had eventually obtained for worthy Mrs. Lite, who had assisted in the shop, the sobriquet of "the raised pie," a title suitable to her changed social condition.