"Yes."
"I beg your pardon, sir, but her Ladyship desires me to say that a friar's omelette has just come up, which she very much wishes you to taste. And she is afraid it will get cold, unless you will be so good as to come down-stairs at once."
"Say, I will come directly."
"The mind, indeed, can hardly be pronounced competent to survey the extended field of observation, which"—which?—which?—Gone again! What else could I expect? A nice chance literature has in this house against luncheon.
I descend to the dining-room, and am politely told that I look as if I had just achieved a wonderful morning's work. "I dare say you have not written in such perfect quiet as this for months past?" says Lady Jinkinson, helping me to the friar's omelette. I begin with that dainty: where I end is more than my recollection enables me to say. Everybody feeds me, under the impression that I am exhausted with writing. All the splendid fellows will drink wine with me, "to set me going again." Nobody believes my rueful assertion that I have done nothing, which they ascribe to excessive modesty. When we rise from table (a process which is performed with extreme difficulty, speaking for myself), I am told that the carriage will be ready in an hour. Lady Jinkinson will not hear of any objections. "No! no!" she says. "I have not asked you here to overwork yourself. I really can't allow that."
I get back to my room, with an extraordinary tightness in my waistcoat, and with slight symptoms of a determination of Sherry to the head. Under these circumstances, returning to work immediately is not to be thought of. Returning to bed is by far the wiser proceeding. I lie down to arrange my ideas. Having none to arrange, I yield to Nature, and go to sleep.
When I wake, my head is clear again. I see my way now to the end of that bit about "the extended field of observation;" and make for my table in high spirits. Just as I sit down, comes another knock at the door. The carriage is ready. The carriage! I had forgotten all about it. There is no way of escape, however. Hours must give way to me, when I am at home; I must give way to hours, when I am at Lady Jinkinson's. My papers are soon shuffled together in my case; and I am once more united with the hospitable party down-stairs. "More bright ideas?" cry the ladies interrogatively, as I take my place in the carriage. "Not the dimmest vestige of one," I answer. Lady Jinkinson shakes her parasol reproachfully at me. "My dear friend, you were always absurdly modest when speaking of yourself; and, do you know, I think it grows on you."
We get back in time to dress for dinner. After dinner, there is the social evening, and more Trovatore. After that, cigars with the splendid fellows in the billiard-room. I look over my day's work, with the calmness of despair, when I get to bed at last. It amounts to four sentences and a half; every line of which is perfectly worthless as a literary composition.
The next morning, I rise before the rest of the family are up, leave a note of apology on my table, and take the early train for London. This is very ungrateful behaviour to people who have treated me with extreme kindness. But here, again, I must confess the hard truth. The demands of my business in life are imperative; and, sad to say, they absolutely oblige me to dispense with Lady Jinkinson.
I have now been confessing my misanthropical sentiments at some length; but I have not by any means done yet with the number of my dear friends whom I could dispense with. To say nothing of my friend who borrows money of me (an obvious nuisance), there is my self-satisfied friend, who can talk of nothing but himself, and his successes in life; there is my inattentive friend, who is perpetually asking me irrelevant questions, and who has no power of listening to my answers; there is my accidental friend, whom I always meet when I go out; there is my hospitable friend, who is continually telling me that he wants so much to ask me to dinner, and who never does really ask me by any chance. All these intimate associates of mine are persons of fundamentally irreproachable characters, and of well-defined positions in the world; and yet so unhappily is my nature constituted, that I am not exaggerating when I acknowledge that I could positively dispense with every one of them.