“Happen I could do with a bit more, like,” he said.

Emily hacked off the bit more and jerked it on to the plate he had held out to her.

“Thanks,” he said; and then, as Emily’s lip curled, and Jos gave him a warning kick under the table, he tried to look as if he had said nothing.

Only when the second course came on did he suspect that the meal was a calculated protest against his presence.  This a Christmas pudding?  The litter of fractured earthenware was hardly held together by the suet and raisins.  All his pride of manhood—­and there was plenty of pride mixed up with Albert Grapp’s humility—­dictated a refusal to touch that pudding.  Yet he soon found himself touching it, though gingerly, with his spoon and fork.

In the matter of dealing with scruts there are two schools—­the old and the new.  The old school pushes its head well over its plate and drops the scrut straight from its mouth.  The new school emits the scrut into the fingers of its left hand and therewith deposits it on the rim of the plate.  Albert noticed that Emily was of the new school.  But might she not despise as affectation in him what came natural to herself?  On the other hand, if he showed himself as a prop of the old school, might she not set her face the more stringently against him?  The chances were that whichever course he took would be the wrong one.

It was then that he had an inspiration—­an idea of the sort that comes to a man once in his life and finds him, likely as not, unable to put it into practice.  Albert was not sure he could consummate this idea of his.  He had indisputably fine teeth—­“a proper mouthful of grinders” in local phrase.  But would they stand the strain he was going to impose on them?  He could but try them.  Without a sign of nervousness he raised his spoon, with one scrut in it, to his mouth.  This scrut he put between two of his left-side molars, bit hard on it, and—­eternity of that moment!—­felt it and heard it snap in two.  Emily also heard it.  He was conscious that at sound of the percussion she started forward and stared at him.  But he did not look at her.  Calmly, systematically, with gradually diminishing crackles, he reduced that scrut to powder, and washed the powder down with a sip of beer.  While he dealt with the second scrut he talked to Jos about the Borough Council’s proposal to erect an electric power-station on the site of the old gas-works down Hillport way.  He was aware of a slight abrasion inside his left cheek.  No matter.  He must be more careful.  There were six scruts still to be negotiated.  He knew that what he was doing was a thing grandiose, unique, epical; a history-making thing; a thing that would outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes.  Yet he kept his head.  He did not hurry, nor did he dawdle.  Scrut by scrut, he ground slowly but he ground exceeding small.  And while he did so he talked wisely and well.  He passed from the power-station to a first edition of Leconte de Lisle’s