Mr. Spinks chuckled behind his table napkin.  “He means a centre piece.  Wouldn’t he make a handsome one!”

Mr. Soper combined a certain stateliness of carriage with a restless insignificance of feature.

“We all know,” said Mrs. Downey, “that Mr. Rickman is a very reserved gentleman.  He has his own thoughts.”

“Thoughts?  I’ve got my thoughts.  But they don’t make me disagreeable to everybody.”

Mr. Spinks craned forward as far as the height of his collar permitted him.  “I wouldn’t be too cock-sure if I were you, Mr. Soper.”

The young end of the table heaved and quivered with primeval mirth.  Even Flossie Walker was moved to a faint smile.  For Mr. Soper, though outwardly taciturn and morose, was possessed inwardly by a perfect fury of sociability, an immortal and insatiable craving to converse.  It was an instinct which, if gratified, would have undermined the whole fabric of the Dinner, being essentially egoistic, destructive and malign.  Mr. Soper resented the rapidity with which Rickman had been accepted by the boarding-house; he himself, after two years’ residence, only maintaining a precarious popularity by little offerings of bon-bons to the ladies.  Hence the bitterness of his present mood.

“There are thoughts and thoughts,” said Mrs. Downey severely, for the commercial gentleman had touched her in a very sensitive place.  “And when Mr. Rickman is in wot I call ’is vein, there’s nobody like him for making a dinner go off.”

Here Mr. Soper achieved a sardonic, a really sardonic smile.  “Oh, of course, if you’re eludin’ to the young gentleman’s appetite—­”

But this was insufferable, it was wounding Mrs. Downey in the tenderest spot of all.  The rose of her face became a peony.

“I’m doing no such thing.  If any gentleman wishes to pay me a compliment—­” her gay smile took for granted that no gentleman could be so barbarous as not to feel that wish—­“let him show an appetite.  As for the ladies, I wish they had an appetite to show.  Mr. Partridge, let me give you a little more canary pudding.  It’s as light as light.  No?  Oh—­come, Mr. Partridge.”

Mr. Partridge’s gesture of refusal was so vast, so expressive, that it amounted to a solemn personal revelation which implied, not so much that Mr. Partridge rejected canary pudding as that he renounced pleasure, of which canary pudding was but the symbol and the sign.

“Mr. Spinks then?  He’ll let me give him another slice, I know.”

“You bet.  Tell you wot it is, Mrs. Downey, the canary that pudding was made of, must have been an uncommonly fine bird.”

There was a swift step on the pavement, the determined click of a latch-key, and the clang of a closing door.

“Why, here is Mr. Rickman,” said Mrs. Downey, betraying the preoccupation of her soul.