course, was being brought on, there was—­how shall I put it? —­ a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told that he was hovering near.  The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them.  The Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost as much as the silver fork it was eaten with.  So it did, for all I know.  This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence; and it was only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual remark:  “They can’t do this anywhere but here.”

“Nowhere,” said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker and nodding his venerable head a number of times.  “Nowhere, assuredly, except here.  It was represented to me that at the Cafe Anglais—­”

Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts.  “It was represented to me that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais.  Nothing like it, sir,” he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like a hanging judge.  “Nothing like it.”

“Overrated place,” said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look of him) for the first time for some months.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, “it’s jolly good for some things.  You can’t beat it at—­”

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead.  His stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar.  They felt as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed—­ if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time.  It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor.  A genuine historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty bottles, and very probably ending with money.  A genuine democrat would have asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil he was doing.  But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near to them, either as a slave or as a friend.  That something had gone wrong with the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment.  They did not want to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent.  They wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over.  It was over.  The waiter, after standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round and ran madly out of the room.