Mrs. Roberts, laughing: “I knew I should catch you if I baited my hook with your old friend.”
Lawton: “Yes, nothing would have kept me away when I heard Bemis was coming. But he doesn’t seem so inflexible in regard to me. Where is he?”
Mrs. Roberts: “I’m sure I don’t know. I’d no idea I was giving such a formal dinner. But everybody, beginning with my own aunt, seems to think it a ceremonious occasion. There are only to be twelve. Do you know the Millers?”
Lawton: “No, thank goodness! One meets some people so often that one fancies one’s weariness of them reflected in their sympathetic countenances. Who are these acceptably novel Millers?”
Mrs. Roberts: “Do explain the Millers to the doctor, Edward.”
Roberts, standing on the hearth-rug, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets: “They board.”
Lawton: “Genus. That accounts for their willingness to flutter round your evening lamp when they ought to be singeing their wings at their own. Well, species?”
Roberts: “They’re very nice young newly married people. He’s something or other of some kind of manufactures. And Mrs. Miller is disposed to think that all the other ladies are as fond of him as she is.”
Mrs. Roberts: “Oh! That is not so, Edward.”
Lawton: “You defend your sex, as women always do. But you’ll admit that, as your friend, Mrs. Miller may have this foible.”