"Where do you write, Mr. Challis?"
"At home—when I'm at home. Or wherever I happen to be at the time." When he had said this, he wondered whether he was going idiotic. It was like saying a mother was always present at the birth of her child.
"But upstairs or down? And is the room at the back of the house?" He gave close particulars of all the rooms at the Hermitage. A capital way of making conversation! But in the end it ran dry.
"I like writing in bed," said he, for variety. "Rabelais wrote in bed." He wasn't sure of this at all. But it didn't matter.
"Oh, indeed!" said the lady. She was an Honourable Miss Something, and not nearly dissolute enough to know anything about authors who write in bed; and, besides, she had her doubts about Rabelais. She changed the conversation delicately. Did Mr. Challis use a Fountain Pen? No, he didn't. Because he thought for a quarter of an hour at every third word, and that was time enough for an active person under fifty to dip his pen in the ink. Pressmen had to write straight on without stopping. The lady took this seriously, and said, "Dear me!"
What followed was very like the sample. Challis could make talk and think of something else quite well. So he thought how different his right-hand neighbour was from Charlotte Eldridge. And that set him a-thinking again about his wife. But there were unnavigable straits in that sea. His thoughts got into shoal-water, and his neighbour pursued a topic unaccompanied until she found she had left him behind. Then indignation kindled, but subject to good-breeding. She would put a test question, though, to see how much attention this gentleman had been paying.
"How many words are there in a book?" The question came with sudden severity, and Challis had to pull himself together to reply.
"Of course," he said, "there's not always exactly the same number. But a hundred thousand, more or less." It was a good answer, and embodied a feeling current in the book-trade. And the conversation, thus re-established, developed on the same lines until the vanishing-point of the army of womankind. Challis fancied he saw commiseration on Judith's face as she brought up the rear. He certainly had seldom in his life passed a duller hour.
He knew what it was going to be next. Dreary politics, wearisome ethics, maudlin philosophy, execrable—thrice execrable!—Social Problems which it was every man's duty to confront, and every other man's duty to hear him elucidate. Yes!—there was Mr. Ramsey Tomes at it already! He had got a good new word to talk with—"noumenal"—and was brandishing it over his hearers' heads....
Oh dear!—metaphysics! Not even free treatment of what Challis's mind classed as Charlottology! That always appealed to our common something or other. Now what he could catch at first hearing seemed bare, cold, cruel Metaphysics. Never an indiscreet lady nor an unprincipled gentleman, nor even a New Morality, of any sort! No fun at all!