"I haven't had much chance of judging," I replied stupidly; "but he seems all right, although perhaps his ideas are not very large."
"Still, you mean that one could always alter that," said Margaret quickly, with the true Jamieson optimism, as applied to the beneficial results of matrimony. There is hardly, I believe, a defect that they think they will not be able to eradicate in a future husband, save, perhaps, the conical shape of Mr. Ward's head. "But I really do not think there is anything that I would like altered," she added simply.
"His name is Tudor," she went on. "George calls him that now, and Maud is beginning to do so—Maud is being so kind; she says it promotes a familiar tone which is very helpful, to call him 'Tudor'—but I can't call him anything but Mr. Swinnerton yet."
After tea Mr. Swinnerton asked us how we had enjoyed our entertainment, and Margaret expressed herself in the highest terms in praise of it. There seemed to be a lingering tendency on Mrs. Jamieson's part to revert to the superior comfort of seven-and-sixpenny places and armchairs, but we checked this by saying with emphasis that it was a friendly afternoon of this kind that we really enjoyed. Mr. Swinnerton then put the Jamiesons into an omnibus, and directed the conductor to "let these ladies out at the top of Sloane Street," in a tone of voice that suggested that they were to be caged and padlocked until that place of exit was reached. He lifted his hat with a fine air to them, and then, as I had called a hansom, he put me into it rather elaborately, and cautioned the commissionaire at the door to "take care of this gentleman."
He will probably call me a South African hero next; I wish he would keep his attentions to himself.
CHAPTER XI.
Last night we dined at the Darcey-Jacobs'. Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs is enjoying "one breath of life" at a hotel with the Major, and she has left quite a pathetic number of visiting-cards on all her friends, so that her short London season may be as full of gaiety as possible. Neither of us looked forward to the dinner-party being particularly lively, but we were a good deal amused at the turn the conversation took during dinner. I have often thought since that a certain dumbness which falls upon some entertainments can be dispersed if the subject of matrimony is started, and I will class with it a discussion on food, and personal experience at the hand of the dentist. Any of these three subjects can be thrown, as it were, into the stagnant deep waters of a voiceless party, and the surface will be instantly rippled with eager conversation.
Talk flagged a little in the private sitting-room of the hotel where the Darcey-Jacobs gave their dinner-party. Major Jacobs, in his guileless way, gave us an exhaustive list of the friends whom they had invited for that evening, but who had not been able to come; and this had a curiously depressing effect upon us all, and within ourselves we speculated unhappily as to whether we had been asked to fill up vacant places.
"Why are men always allowed to blunder?" said Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs, looking over her high nose at the gentleman next her, and tapping him on the arm with her lorgnettes.