If it were fine they would be out in the garden at the back. Only the drizzle is there still. But it keeps very close, too, and we must have the window wide open. The lamp won't blow out if we stand it away on the sideboard. This sideboard is the one that was bought—such a bargain!—for Great Coram Street. Those rings on the drawers that swing—handles to pull them open and find the corkscrew—are the rings that Bob in his infancy was permitted to use as knockers in a drama he was the hero of—a postman who delivered letters at very short intervals indeed. Oh, how his surroundings of this evening stung Challis with memories of his past! How they drove home to him the need to keep at bay those outlying fires—or wild beasts, were they?—that had made an inroad on his present.
If he could only have been a Roman Emperor now! Had he not read lately somewhere how Hadrian had married two Persian Princesses—real ones!—two at once!—as cool as a cucumber? Oh dear!...
What is that Marianne is saying? "You're not the one to talk, Titus!"
"Talk about what, Polly Anne?" His first puff, with this, and he is in great comfort and good-humour! The wild beasts are standing over.
"About Duchesses and Baronets' wives! Just look at your Grosvenor Squares!" There is little or no ill-humour here. Rather it might be called concession to good-humour; an admission of her husband's friends to their talk as permanent objects—forgiven objects, certainly—of critical raillery. No harm meant!
And if there were, Challis would ignore it, rather than have his pipe spoilt. "Don't let's talk about them," he says. "Let's talk about our Grosvenor Squares."
"Your Grosvenor Squares!"
"My Grosvenor Squares, then! Polly Anne shall have her own way." And then he had to stifle at birth a most excruciating thought: "If I had only just succeeded in keeping my accursed folly under, I might now have continued, 'You know, Polly Anne dear, they might be your Grosvenor Squares, too, and nothing would please me better. Why not be jolly?'" How could he make such a speech now? His only chance of a real tranquil life was to keep as far away from the source of his disturbance as possible. He succeeded in suffocating the thought, and repeated, "Let's talk about my Grosvenor Squares."
Marianne's reply was a grudging sound. "Well!—and how are they?" The unspoken addendum seemed to be: "I suppose I must say something. What do you make of this, my minimum? Take it!"
But Challis was in for pretending that all was well, and the world unsullied by what Mr. Riderhood called "offences giv' and took." Everybody was very well at Royd, he testified. Only this time the house-party was so over-powering that he had not seen nearly so much of the family as on the previous occasion. In fact, some of the members he had hardly spoken to—a statement so intensely true that it brought his veracity up to a reasonable average.