EUPHEMIA’S NEW ENTERTAINMENT

Euphemia has great ideas of putting people at their ease, a thousand little devices for thawing the very stiffest among them with a home-like glow.  Far be it from me to sing her praises, but I must admit that at times she is extremely successful in this—­at times almost too successful.  That tea-cake business, for instance.  No doubt it’s a genial expedient to make your guests toast his own tea-cake:  down he must go upon his knees upon your hearthrug, and his poses will melt away like the dews of the morning before the rising sun.  Nevertheless, when it comes to roasting a gallant veteran like Major Augustus, deliberately roasting him, in spite of the facts that he has served his country nobly through thirty irksome years of peace, and that he admires Euphemia with a delicate fervour—­roasting him, I say, alive, as if he were a Strasburg goose, or suddenly affixing a delicate young genius to the hither end of a toasting-fork while he is in the midst of a really very subtle and tender conversation, the limits of social warmth seem to be approaching dangerously near.  However, this scarcely concerns Euphemia’s new entertainment.

This new entertainment is modelling in clay.  Euphemia tells me it is to be quite the common thing this winter.  It is intended especially for the evening, after a little dinner.  As the reader is aware, the evening after a little dinner is apt to pall.  A certain placid contentment creeps over people.  I don’t know in what organ originality resides; but it’s a curious thing, and one I must leave to the consideration of psychologists, that people’s output of original remarks appears to be obstructed in some way after these gastronomic exercises.  Then a little dinner always confirms my theory of the absurdity of polygonal conversation.  Music and songs, too, have their drawbacks, especially gay songs; they invariably evoke a vaporous melancholy.  Card-playing Euphemia objects to because her uncle, the dean, is prominent in connection with some ridiculous association for the suppression of gambling; and in what are called “games” no rational creature esteeming himself an immortal soul would participate.  In this difficulty it was that Euphemia—­decided, I fancy, by the possession of certain really very becoming aprons—­took up this business of clay-modelling.

You have a lump of greyish clay and a saucer of water and certain small tools of wood (for which I cannot discover the slightest use in the world) given you, and Euphemia puts on a very winning bib.  Then, moistening the clay until it acquires sufficient plasticity, and incidentally splashing your cuffs and coat-sleeves with an agreeably light tinted mud, you set to work.  At first people are a little disgusted at the apparent dirtiness of the employment, and also perhaps rather diffident.  The eldest lady says weakly deprecatory things, and the feeblest male is jocular after his