Towcester, Lady Flower, Miss Knipper-Totes, Lady Dombey, Mr. Lacrevy, Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. and Mrs. Gosse—­and naturally for the most part David only half caught their names while they, without masking their indifference, closed their ears to his ("Some student or other from his classes, I suppose—­rather nicely dressed, rather too good-looking for a young man"); and Rossiter, who had been interrupted first by Mrs. Rossiter asking him to observe that Lady Dombey had nothing on her plate, and secondly by David’s entrance, resumed his discourse.  Goodness knew that he didn’t want to discourse on these occasions, but Society expected it of him.  There were quite twenty—­twenty-two—­people present and most of them—­all the women—­wanted to go away and say four hours afterwards: 

“We were (I was) at the Rossiters this afternoon, and the Professor was fascinating” ("great,” “profoundly interesting,” “shocking, my dear,” “scandalous,” “disturbing,” “illuminating,” “more-than-usually-enthral
ling-only-she-would-keep-interrupting-why-is-she-such-a-fool?”) according to the idiosyncrasy of the diner-out.  “He talked to us about the thyroid gland—­I don’t believe poor Bob’s got one, between ourselves—­and how if you enlarged it or reduced it you’d adjust people’s characters to suit the needs of Society; and all about chimpanzi’s blood—­I believe he vivisects half through the night in that studio behind the house—­being the same as ours; and then Ray Lankester and Chalmers Mitchell argued about the caeca—­caecums, you know—­something to do with appendicitis—­of the mammalia, and altogether we had a high old time—­I always learn something on their Thursdays.”

Well:  Rossiter resumed his description of an experiment he was making—­quite an everyday one, of course, for there were at least three men present to whom he wasn’t going to give away clues prematurely.  An experiment on the motor biallaxis of dormice.

[Mrs. Rossiter had six months previously bought a dormouse in a cage at a bazaar, and after idolizing it for a week had forgotten all about it.  Her husband had rescued it half starved; his assistant had fed it up in the laboratory, and they had tried a few experiments on it with painless drugs with astonishing results.]

The recital really was interesting and entirely outside the priggishness of Science, but it was marred in consecutiveness and simplicity by Mrs. Rossiter’s interruptions.  “Michael dear, Lady Dombey’s cup!” Or:  “Mike, could you cut that cake and hand it round?” Or, if she didn’t interrupt her husband she started stories and side-issues of her own in a voice that was quite distinctly heard, about a new stitch in crochet she had seen in the Queen, or her inspection of the East Marrybone soup kitchen.