At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing a handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to some cold beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he declined. No Christian butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After a longish absence he returned to the table with half the joint on his plate. Susan regarded it wide-eyed.
"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an audible whisper.
"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle Adrian, if I don't get enough to eat!"
"And Aunt Doria?"
Again he reddened—but he turned to Doria and bowed.
"In my quality of ogre only—a bonne bouche," said he.
It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner. We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a new kind of hippopotamus.
The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow, discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when Jaffery's voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the discriminating nicety out of my head. I lazily shifted my position and watched the pair.
"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic and all that," Jaffery was saying—his light word about an ogre at lunch was not a bad one; sitting side by side on the low parapet they looked like a vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine black-haired elf—she had taken off her hat—engaged in a conversation in which the elf looked very much on the defensive—"and you're always tracking down motives to their roots, and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of things—"
"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual woman's nature, the blatant universalist has his points."