At this date the dinner-party was still an unshaken British institution, a stately serious affair in any circumstances, like matrimony, not to be entered into lightly, and when conducted on the grand scale habitual to Prince’s Gate, all preliminaries needed thoughtful care. For the minute of time before the horses pulled up, Mr. and Mrs. Verinder were both turning things over in their minds.
To all of them, as they entered the hall, there came that vague and usually unanalysed sensation which most people experience on returning home from a party; it is a faint shock of surprise caused by the silence and tranquillity after the noise and commotion; as if, because you have been hearing music, chattering, drinking wine, getting warm in a crowd, you expect your house to show that it has also passed through slight agitation and excitement. For a moment you are consciously or unconsciously displeased that it should have been quite unconcerned in anything that concerned you so much; then the solidness of the fact seems to steady your nerves and bring you comfort. Home again!
In the wisely restricted lamp-light turned on for them by the butler, one saw pallid marble nymphs and gods with black caves of shadow behind them, the squat richly carved legs of heavy tables whose further ends were lost in gloom, the gilt balustrade of the staircase glittering, and the stairs themselves rising sharply and as sharply turning till they grew dim and faded out on a level with the first floor. Above that all was dark, and one had an impression of the house stretching upward in the darkness to a fantastic height. The butler moving ahead gave them of a sudden a doorway of yellow flames, so dazzling did it seem as he switched and switched, flooding a large inner room with vivid light. They went in after him.
This room had never been properly named; it was spoken of indifferently as the boudoir, the morning-room, and mother’s room—although Mrs. Verinder herself did not put forward any claim to proprietorial rights. Probably her title to it merely rested upon the circumstance that the portrait of her by Millais had been hung above its marble chimney-piece. Like every other room in the house, it displayed evidences of moderate wealth, painstaking care, and a docile adhesion to the prevailing standards of good taste. The walls were cream-coloured, with panels of red satin—two large patches of the satin being hidden by the Millais picture and another picture of similar size but strangely different subject by Leighton. There were more of those massive heavily carved tables, some big chairs with golden legs and tapestry backs, and here and there on the parquetry floor had been placed firmly secured mounds of velvet and brocade cushions, forming the easy backless seats then known as “poufs.” These poufs had been chosen by Mrs. Verinder, and, sinking voluminously upon one of them, she gave a sign of fatigue, and stared at Millais’ notion of her as she was once. A smaller pouf would have fitted her in that first year of her married life.
Margaret, fairer, shorter, plumper, altogether more bustling than her sister, went to one of the tables, where a silver tray with cut-glass bottles and tumblers waited for them, and poured out soda-water. Mr. Verinder at another table busied himself with the bed-rock detail of his dinner-party, consulting a gold-framed calendar and jotting down names on an ivory tablet. “The Cluttons,” he murmured, “and old Sir Timothy—and the Everard-Browns.”
“Don’t forget some young men for Emmeline,” said Mrs. Pratt gaily.
“I never do,” said Mr. Verinder. And that was true. Before his time in that respect, he liked to see a few fresh young faces even at his most ceremonious feasts; moreover, as the father of daughters, he knew that one must not think only of oneself. It was at a big dinner that Lionel Pratt first betrayed his inclination towards Margaret. “I am thinking now more of the day than the company,” he continued; and he ran his pencil down the calendar. “Seventeen days will bring us to the twelfth, and that’s a Thursday. At this time of year you can’t expect people to be free unless you give them adequate notice.”
“Emmeline,” said Mrs. Verinder, yawning, “would you like young What’s-his-name—that friend of Mrs. Pryce-Jones—Gerald Something—to be asked?”
Emmeline did not answer. She was standing at the corner of the chimney-piece, one arm stretched along the marble, her cloak thrown open. Her eyes seemed queerly large and black, her cheeks white, her breathing wearily rapid; so that she had the aspect worn by her when, in the maternal phrase, she had been “overdoing it”—playing too many sets at lawn tennis, riding too long in the Row, going to too many theatres in the same week.
“There’s no occasion for you to stay up,” said Mrs. Verinder, observing this look on her daughter’s face. “You go to bed, dear”; and she added the farewell words that she had first begun to utter when Emmeline was a child of fourteen. “Don’t read in bed.”