Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.
“I don’t know of anything more dreadful,” he said, pulling at the joint of a chicken’s leg, “than being seen when one isn’t conscious of it. One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous—looking at one’s tongue in a hansom, for instance.”
Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat down in a circle round the baskets.
“And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of their own,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “One’s features look so different when one can only see a bit of them.”
“There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And four-wheeled cabs—I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.”
“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.
“Veal pie,” said Arthur.
“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst. “They’re distressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”
But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest of God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the conversation.
“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own back, I expect,” he remarked.