A host has no right to interne a regiment of his relations in his house unless he also invites lively and agreeable outsiders to meet them.  If he does commit this solecism the least he can do is to work himself to the bone in the effort to invent amusements and diversions for his victims.  Lord Emsworth had failed badly in both these matters.  With the exception of Mr. Peters, his daughter Aline and George Emerson, there was nobody in the house who did not belong to the clan; and, as for his exerting himself to entertain, the company was lucky if it caught a glimpse of its host at meals.

Lord Emsworth belonged to the people-who-like-to-be-left-
alone-to-amuse-themselves-when-they-come-to-a-place school of hosts.  He pottered about the garden in an old coat—­now uprooting a weed, now wrangling with the autocrat from Scotland, who was theoretically in his service as head gardener—–­dreamily satisfied, when he thought of them at all, that his guests were as perfectly happy as he was.

Apart from his son Freddie, whom he had long since dismissed as a youth of abnormal tastes, from whom nothing reasonable was to be expected, he could not imagine anyone not being content merely to be at Blandings when the buds were bursting on the trees.

A resolute hostess might have saved the situation; but Lady Ann Warblington’s abilities in that direction stopped short at leaving everything to Mrs. Twemlow and writing letters in her bedroom.  When Lady Ann Warblington was not writing letters in her bedroom—­which was seldom, for she had an apparently inexhaustible correspondence—­she was nursing sick headaches in it.  She was one of those hostesses whom a guest never sees except when he goes into the library and espies the tail of her skirt vanishing through the other door.

As for the ordinary recreations of the country house, the guests could frequent the billiard room, where they were sure to find Lord Stockheath playing a hundred up with his cousin, Algernon Wooster—­a spectacle of the liveliest interest—­or they could, if fond of golf, console themselves for the absence of links in the neighborhood with the exhilarating pastime of clock golf; or they could stroll about the terraces with such of their relations as they happened to be on speaking terms with at the moment, and abuse their host and the rest of their relations.

This was the favorite amusement; and after breakfast, on a morning ten days after Joan and Ashe had formed their compact, the terraces were full of perambulating couples.  Here, Colonel Horace Mant, walking with the Bishop of Godalming, was soothing that dignitary by clothing in soldierly words thoughts that the latter had not been able to crush down, but which his holy office scarcely permitted him to utter.

There, Lady Mildred Mant, linked to Mrs. Jack Hale, of the collateral branch of the family, was saying things about her father in his capacity of host and entertainer, that were making her companion feel like another woman.  Farther on, stopping occasionally to gesticulate, could be seen other Emsworth relations and connections.  It was a typical scene of quiet, peaceful English family life.