“They are pig-headed,” he added fiercely; “pig-headed and selfish; they are like children who cry for food ten minutes before dinner-time: it is bound to come if they will wait a little.”
“And you will tell them so?”
“That they are pig-headed? Certainly.”
Mabel looked at her husband with a pleased twinkle in her eyes. She knew perfectly well that his popularity rested largely on his outspokenness: folks liked to be scolded and abused by a genial bold man who danced and gesticulated in a magnetic fury; she liked it herself.
“How shall you go?” she asked.
“Volor. I shall catch the eighteen o’clock at Blackfriars; the meeting is at nineteen, and I shall be back at twenty-one.”
He addressed himself vigorously to his entree, and his mother looked up with a patient, old-woman smile.
Mabel began to drum her fingers softly on the damask.
“Please make haste, my dear,” she said; “I have to be at Brighton at three.”
Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the table.