Happily they had no one else to wait for, and it heartened her mightily to think that she had ordered the promptest possible service of the dinner.  Capes stood beside Miss Stanley, who was beaming unnaturally, and Mr. Stanley, in his effort to seem at ease, took entire possession of the hearthrug.

“You found the flat easily?” said Capes in the pause.  “The numbers are a little difficult to see in the archway.  They ought to put a lamp.”

Her father declared there had been no difficulty.

“Dinner is served, m’m,” said the efficient parlor-maid in the archway, and the worst was over.

“Come, daddy,” said Ann Veronica, following her husband and Miss Stanley; and in the fulness of her heart she gave a friendly squeeze to the parental arm.

“Excellent fellow!” he answered a little irrelevantly.  “I didn’t understand, Vee.”

“Quite charming apartments,” Miss Stanley admired; “charming!  Everything is so pretty and convenient.”

The dinner was admirable as a dinner; nothing went wrong, from the golden and excellent clear soup to the delightful iced marrons and cream; and Miss Stanley’s praises died away to an appreciative acquiescence.  A brisk talk sprang up between Capes and Mr. Stanley, to which the two ladies subordinated themselves intelligently.  The burning topic of the Mendelian controversy was approached on one or two occasions, but avoided dexterously; and they talked chiefly of letters and art and the censorship of the English stage.  Mr. Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of what he styled latter-day fiction; good wholesome stories were being ousted, he said, by “vicious, corrupting stuff” that “left a bad taste in the mouth.”  He declared that no book could be satisfactory that left a bad taste in the mouth, however much it seized and interested the reader at the time.  He did not like it, he said, with a significant look, to be reminded of either his books or his dinners after he had done with them.  Capes agreed with the utmost cordiality.

“Life is upsetting enough, without the novels taking a share,” said Mr. Stanley.

For a time Ann Veronica’s attention was diverted by her aunt’s interest in the salted almonds.

“Quite particularly nice,” said her aunt.  “Exceptionally so.”

When Ann Veronica could attend again she found the men were discussing the ethics of the depreciation of house property through the increasing tumult of traffic in the West End, and agreeing with each other to a devastating extent.  It came into her head with real emotional force that this must be some particularly fantastic sort of dream.  It seemed to her that her father was in some inexplicable way meaner-looking than she had supposed, and yet also, as unaccountably, appealing.  His tie had demanded a struggle; he ought to have taken a clean one after his first failure.  Why was she noting things like this?  Capes seemed