He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again Lady Veula caught the frightened note in his laughter.  Mrs. Henry, with practical sympathy, was telling Francesca two good ways for getting wine stains out of tablecloths.  The smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch of learning for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully and conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child commits to memory the measurements and altitudes of the world’s principal mountain peaks.  Some women of her temperament and mentality know by heart the favourite colours, flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal Family; Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been over-long in storage.

Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to have fallen over all efforts at festivity, and she contented herself with refilling her glass and simply drinking to her boy’s good health.  The others followed her example, and Comus drained his glass with a brief “thank you all very much.”  The sense of constraint which hung over the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause in the conversation.  Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as possible in private life.  He did not propose to sit through dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle’s personal narrative of philanthropic movements and experiences, and took the first opportunity of launching himself into a flow of satirical observations on current political affairs.  Lady Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her own home circle, and sat listening with the stoical indifference with which an Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more, in the course of an Arctic winter.  Serena Golackly felt a certain relief at the fact that her imported guest was not, after all, monopolising the conversation.  But the latter was too determined a personality to allow himself to be thrust aside for many minutes by the talkative M.P.  Henry Greech paused for an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of satire, and immediately Thorle’s penetrating voice swept across the table.

“Oh, you politicians!” he exclaimed, with pleasant superiority; “you are always fighting about how things should be done, and the consequence is you are never able to do anything.  Would you like me to tell you what a Unitarian horsedealer said to me at Brindisi about politicians?”

A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of the unexpected.  Henry Greech’s witticisms at the expense of the Front Opposition bench were destined to remain as unfinished as his wife’s history of the broken soup-plates.  Thorle was primed with an ample succession of stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty, thriftlessness, reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which carried him in an almost uninterrupted sequence through the remainder of the dinner.