There was a great deal of giggling. The air round Emily was full of crumpled crabs. There was one in her hair. Everyone was talking now, but Edward was still entangled in the future of the canning trade. His only remark in the next fifteen minutes was, “Well, personally I never met a canner....” He realised at last that Bossy and he were haunted by the same fear—the fear of being left out. The canning trade was a bond between them. “At least we look as if we were talking,” thought Edward. Bossy was a university instructor with fair childlike hair contradicting the severity of horn-rimmed spectacles and a little imperial. To share a danger with him aroused in Edward no enthusiasm.
“My Lord!” he heard Melsie Ponting say. “I’m just sick of sitting next to Lon. I’ll tell the world he’s no gentleman. He’s just said something that I couldn’t possibly repeat in mixed company. Would anybody like me to?”
Emily shouted, “All right then, General Post!” Having arrived late she was sitting between two elderly women.
There was a deafening snarling and roaring of chairs pushed back. Everyone was changing seats. Edward sat still. It was a test of his hour, he thought, “If it really is to be my hour Emily will come and sit by me.” The two women on his left hand fled. Rhoda Romero on his right hand smiled at him and moved away. Bossy moved up. Edward was suddenly filled with panic because no-one was coming to sit on his right. Everyone would laugh at him. No-one was on his side. Edward rapidly reminded himself of the few persons in his experience who had professed to be fond of him. Jimmy ... the landlady’s daughter in Putney ... his mother ... young Henderson at school—but he had a clubfoot ... that amazing hatshop woman in Regent Street—but Jimmy had taken her over.... Quite a lot of people, Edward thought, trying to fight against his panic. “It doesn’t much matter if nobody appreciates me here.”
The room was dusty and hot and there were flies. A most exasperating fatigued fly could not muster energy to leave the neighborhood of Edward’s lips. Dismissed, it let itself fall through the air for half an inch and then settled languidly again on his face.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting ran up the room so that the floor shook. She sat with a florid gesture in the chair on Edward’s right. She looked at him with her head on one side, her manicured fingers fussily arranging the beads on her breast.
“There there,” she said to Edward. “Was it lonesome?” She puckered her strawberry-colored lips towards him. She dropped first her cigarette case and then her vanity bag. Edward felt smiling and busy sitting beside her. He was conscious of gratitude towards her.... The whole room was splashing with a choppy flood of talk. Edward’s ears hummed; he was drowning in noise.
“After all, I am host. It was because of me that they all came. It is only that I haven’t pulled the reins yet.”
“Did you bring a poem for us to hear?” he asked Melsie. “If so, you must hand it to me folded, so that I shall never know who it’s by.”
“My dear, you’ll kill me laughing.... Me, a highbrow? I’d swim across the bay sooner. But lots of the folks have brought things to read and they’re all handing them in to Rhoda Romero. I guess it’s that tin-trumpet voice of hers that makes them all think she’s such a dandy reader.”