“No.”
Then it is no good telling her what our handicap is.
“No doubt your prefer tennis,” we hazard.
“Oh no.”
“I mean bridge.”
“I don’t play any game,” she answers.
Then the sooner she goes away and talks to somebody
else the better.
“Ah, I expect you’re more interested in
the theatre?”
“I hardly ever go to the theatre.”
“Well, of course, a good book by the fireside—”
“I never read,” she says.
Dash the woman, what does she do? But before
we can ask her, she lets us into the great secret.
“I like talking,” she says.
Good Heavens! What else have we been trying to
do all this time?
However, it is only the very young girl at her first
dinner-party whom it is difficult to entertain.
At her second dinner-party, and thereafter, she knows
the whole art of being amusing. All she has to
do is to listen; all we men have to do is to tell her
about ourselves. Indeed, sometimes I think that
it is just as well to begin at once. Let us be
quite frank about it, and get to work as soon as we
are introduced.
“How do you do. Lovely day it has been,
hasn’t it? It was on just such a day as
this, thirty-five years ago, that I was born in the
secluded village of Puddlecome of humble but honest
parents. Nestling among the western hills...”
And so on. Ending, at the dessert, with the thousand
we earned that morning.
There is a girl in one of William de Morgan’s
books who interrupts the narrator of a breathless
tiger-hunting story with the rather disconcerting
warning, “I’m on the side of the tiger;
I always am.” It was the sporting instinct.
Tigers may be wicked beasts who defend themselves
when they are attacked, but one cannot help feeling
a little sorry for them. Their number is up.
The hunters are too many, the rifles too accurate,
for the hunted to have any real chance. So she
was on the side of the tiger; she always was.
In the same way I am on the side of the convict; I
always am. Not, of course, until he is a convict.
But when once the Law has condemned him, and he is
safely in prison, then he is only one against so many.
It is impossible not to sympathize with his attempts
to escape. Perhaps, if one lived close to a prison,
in a cottage, say, whose tenant was invariably called
upon by any escaping prisoner and made to exchange
clothes with the help of a crow-bar, one might feel
differently. But in theory we are all of us inclined
to applaud the man who fights successfully such a
lone battle against such tremendous odds; yes, even
if it was the blackest of crimes which sent him into
captivity.
