“Dress for dinner, in a hole like this? Whatever for?”
“You don’t understand the technique of the thing. If I’m to have complete control of the conversation, I must be looking my best. It makes all the difference with a susceptible old dear like Edward.”
She certainly had made herself look attractive, if a trifle exotic, by the time she came downstairs. The maid all but broke the soup-plates at the sight of her.
“Did you see much of Pullford, Mrs. Bredon?” asked Brinkman, on hearing of their day’s expedition.
“Much of it? Why, I’m practically a native of the place by now. I shall never see a perambulator again, I mean a drain-pipe, without a sort of homely feeling. My husband left me alone for three solid hours while he went and caroused with the hierarchy.”
“A very genial man, isn’t he, the Bishop,” said Brinkman, appealing to her husband.
“What a poor compliment that word genial is,” put in the old gentleman. “I would sooner be called well-meaning, myself. You have no grounds for saying that a man is really kind or charitable; you have not personally found him attractive; and yet he has a sort of good-natured way with him which demands some tribute. So you say he is genial.”
“Like a Dickens character?” suggested Brinkman.
“No, they are too human to be called merely genial. Mr. Pickwick genial! It is like calling the day of judgment a fine sight. How did Pusey, by the way, ever have the wit to light upon such a comparison?”
“I think witty is rather a dreadful thing to be called,” said Angela. “I always think of witty people as people who dominate the conversation with long anecdotes. How glad I am to have been born into a world in which the anecdote has gone out of fashion!”