Food was quite properly the chief preoccupation.  The diners ate as those eat who are paying a fixed price per day for as much as they can consume while observing the rules of the game.  Without moving their heads they glanced out of the corners of their eyes, watching the manoeuvres of the three starched maids who served.  They had no conception of food save as portions laid out in rows on large silver dishes, and when a maid bent over them deferentially, balancing the dish, they summed up the offering in an instant, and in an instant decided how much they could decently take, and to what extent they could practise the theoretic liberty of choice.  And if the food for any reason did not tempt them, or if it egregiously failed to coincide with their aspirations, they considered themselves aggrieved.  For, according to the game, they might not command; they had the right to seize all that was presented under their noses, like genteel tigers; and they had the right to refuse:  that was all.  The dinner was thus a series of emotional crises for the diners, who knew only that full dishes and clean plates came endlessly from the banging door behind the screen, and that ravaged dishes and dirty plates vanished endlessly through the same door.  They were all eating similar food simultaneously; they began together and they finished together.  The flies that haunted the paper-bunches which hung from the chandeliers to the level of the flower-vases, were more free.  The sole event that chequered the exact regularity of the repast was the occasional arrival of a wine-bottle for one of the guests.  The receiver of the wine-bottle signed a small paper in exchange for it and wrote largely a number on the label of the bottle; then, staring at the number and fearing that after all it might be misread by a stupid maid or an unscrupulous compeer, he would re-write the number on another part of the label, even more largely.

Matthew Peel-Swynnerton obviously did not belong to this world.  He was a young man of twenty-five or so, not handsome, but elegant.  Though he was not in evening dress, though he was, as a fact, in a very light grey suit, entirely improper to a dinner, he was elegant.  The suit was admirably cut, and nearly new; but he wore it as though he had never worn anything else.  Also his demeanour, reserved yet free from self-consciousness, his method of handling a knife and fork, the niceties of his manner in transferring food from the silver dishes to his plate, the tone in which he ordered half a bottle of wine—­all these details infallibly indicated to the company that Matthew Peel-Swynnerton was their superior.  Some folks hoped that he was the son of a lord, or even a lord.  He happened to be fixed at the end of the table, with his back to the window, and there was a vacant chair on either side of him; this situation favoured the hope of his high rank.  In truth, he was the son, the grandson, and several times the nephew, of earthenware manufacturers.  He noticed