It had come, the sublimely ridiculous. But still—I ventured: “Then most of your guests are Welsh folk?”
“Not one; all English and American. But ‘When in Rome,’ you know, Bannerlee. I like to pay tribute to the mores of the place. That’s a word of Belvoir’s; you know what I mean.”
In anyone but Crofts Pendleton I should have held such deference to the manners of the parish or the borough or the shire to be a gesture of mock. But mockery was out of the question in that face of perfect guilelessness. So innocent and susceptible were those big features that I had a momentary impulse to tell him that there appeared to be “goings-on” in the House. But I forbore.
So, beginning to lay aside my reeking clothes, I asked him the nature of the party, and if it were in celebration of a particular occasion, and in so doing I met point-blank another of his vague notions, disassociated from the working of any ordinary mind.
“A very special occasion indeed,” he declared. “We are having a wedding party—that is, there’s going to be a wedding party; to-night it’s a Bidding Feast.”
“Bidding Feast?”
“Yes,” said Crofts, evincing much pleasure in his revelation. “It accords with the folk custom. You look oddly. Haven’t you heard of it?”
“Not sufficiently, I fear.”
“It’s very old, very old, to help the married-pair-to-be to set up housekeeping.”
“Then I am amiss in not knowing something of it, having turned desultory antiquarian since we were last together. Tell me about it.”