But he didn’t see it.  The irony of it was lost on him.  The jackass merely said—­quite amiably and unconsciously —­that he thought I’d play a good game presently.  Me!  Play a good game presently!

I gave him a look, just one look as I went out!  But I don’t think he saw it.  He was talking to some one else.

(IV) HIS HOSTESS AT DINNER

On what principle that woman makes up her dinner parties is more than human brain can devise.  Mind you, I like going out to dinner.  To my mind it’s the very best form of social entertainment.  But I like to find myself among people that can talk, not among a pack of numbskulls.  What I like is good general conversation, about things worth talking about.  But among a crowd of idiots like that what can you expect?  You’d think that even society people would be interested, or pretend to be, in real things.  But not a bit.  I had hardly started to talk about the rate of exchange on the German mark in relation to the fall of sterling bills—­a thing that you would think a whole table full of people would be glad to listen to—­when first thing I knew the whole lot of them had ceased paying any attention and were listening to an insufferable ass of an Englishman—­I forget his name.  You’d hardly suppose that just because a man has been in Flanders and has his arm in a sling and has to have his food cut up by the butler, that’s any reason for having a whole table full of people listening to him.  And especially the women:  they have a way of listening to a fool like that with their elbows on the table that is positively sickening.

I felt that the whole thing was out of taste and tried in vain, in one of the pauses, to give a lead to my hostess by referring to the prospect of a shipping subsidy bill going through to offset the register of alien ships.  But she was too utterly dense to take it up.  She never even turned her head.  All through dinner that ass talked —­he and that silly young actor they’re always asking there that is perpetually doing imitations of the vaudeville people.  That kind of thing may be all right, for those who care for it—­I frankly don’t—­outside a theatre.  But to my mind the idea of trying to throw people into fits of laughter at a dinner-table is simply execrable taste.  I cannot see the sense of people shrieking with laughter at dinner.  I have, I suppose, a better sense of humour than most people.  But to my mind a humourous story should be told quietly and slowly in a way to bring out the point of the humour and to make it quite clear by preparing for it with proper explanations.  But with people like that I find I no sooner get well started with a story than some fool or other breaks in.  I had a most amusing experience the other day—­that is, about fifteen years ago—­at a summer hotel in the Adirondacks, that one would think would have amused even a shallow lot of people like those, but I had no sooner started to tell it—­or had hardly done more than to describe the Adirondacks in a general way—­than, first thing I know, my hostess, stupid woman, had risen and all the ladies were trooping out.