“No, thanks, mother.”
And Nancy in her turn looks once swiftly at her mother, sitting there at the end of the table like a faded grey sparrow whose feathers make it uncomfortable. It isn't feathers, though, really—its only Oliver. Why can't mother get reconciled to Oliver—why can't she—and if she can't, why doesn't she come out and say so instead of trying to be generous to Oliver when she doesn't want to while he's there and then saying mean things when he's away because she can't help it?
“Stanley?”
“Why, no, my dear—no—yes, a few, perhaps—I might reconsider—only a few, my dear,”—his voice does not do anything as definite as cease—it merely becomes ineffectual as Mrs. Ellicott heaps his plate. He then looks at the beans as if he hadn't the slightest idea where they came from but supposes as long as they are there they must be got away with somehow, and starts putting them into his mouth as mechanically as if they were pennies and he a slot-machine.
It is hot in the Ellicotts' dining-room—the butter was only brought in a little while ago, but already it is yellow mush. There are little drops on the backs of Mr. Ellicott's hands. Oliver wants to help Nancy take away the dishes and bring in the fruit—they have started to make a game out of it already when Mrs. Ellicott's voice enforces order.
“No, Oliver. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have a guest that Nancy and I are apt to forget our manners—”
Oliver looks to Nancy for guidance, receives it and subsides into his chair. That's just the trouble, he thinks rather peevishly—if only Mrs. Ellicott would stop acting as if he were a guest—and not exactly a guest by choice at that but one who must be the more scrupulously entertained in public, the less he is liked in private.
The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it—her voice implies that she is quite sure Oliver doesn't think it good enough for him but that he ought to feel himself very lucky indeed that it isn't his deserts instead. Mr. Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange juice up his sleeve. Oliver and Nancy looking at each other.
“Are you the same?” say both kinds of eyes, intent, absorbed with the wish that has been starved small through the last three months, but now grows again like a smoke-tree out of a magicked jar, “Really the same and really loving me and really glad to be here?” But they can get no proper sort of answer now—there are too many other Ellicotts around, especially Mrs. Ellicott.
Dinner is over with coffee and cigarettes that Mrs. Ellicott has bought for Oliver because no one shall ever say she failed in the smallest punctilio of hospitality, though she offers them to him with a gesture like that of a missionary returning his baked-mud idol to a Bushman too far gone in sin to reclaim. Mr. Ellicott smoked cigarettes before his marriage. For twenty years now he has been a contributing member of the Anti-Tobacco League.