“Sir?”

“I suppose one will be enough?”

“Well, sir, as a rule, yes,” said the vizier, calmly.  “Sometimes I get a couple for one family, sir.”

Though he had started jocularly, Edward Henry finished by blenching. 
“I think one will do ...  I may possibly send for my own car.”

He drove to Quayther & Cuthering’s in his electric brougham and there dropped casually the name of Winkworth.  He explained humorously his singular misadventure of the Minnetonka, and was very successful therewith—­so successful, indeed, that he actually began to believe in the reality of the adventure himself, and had an irrational impulse to dispatch a wireless message to his bewildered valet on board the Minnetonka.

Subsequently he paid other fruitful visits in the neighbourhood, and at about half-past eleven the fruit was arriving at Wilkins’s in the shape of many parcels and boxes, comprising diverse items in the equipment of a man-about-town, such as tie-clips and Innovation trunks.

Returning late to Wilkins’s for lunch he marched jauntily into the large brilliant restaurant and commenced an adequate repast.  Of course he was still wearing his mediocre lounge-suit (his sole suit for another two days), but somehow the consciousness that Quayther & Cuthering were cutting out wondrous garments for him in Vigo Street stiffened his shoulders and gave a mysterious style to that lounge-suit.

At lunch he made one mistake and enjoyed one very remarkable piece of luck.

The mistake was to order an artichoke.  He did not know how to eat an artichoke.  He had never tried to eat an artichoke, and his first essay in this difficult and complex craft was a sad fiasco.  It would not have mattered if, at the table next to his own, there had not been two obviously experienced women, one ill-dressed, with a red hat, the other well-dressed, with a blue hat; one middle-aged, the other much younger; but both very observant.  And even so, it would scarcely have mattered had not the younger woman been so slim, pretty and alluring.  While tolerably careless of the opinion of the red-hatted, plain woman of middle-age, he desired the unqualified approval of the delightful young thing in the blue hat.  They certainly interested themselves in his manoeuvres with the artichoke, and their amusement was imperfectly concealed.  He forgave the blue hat, but considered that the red hat ought to have known better.  They could not be princesses, nor even titled aristocrats.  He supposed them to belong to some baccarat-playing county family.

The piece of luck consisted in the passage down the restaurant of the Countess of Chell, who had been lunching there with a party, and whom he had known locally in more gusty days.  The Countess bowed stiffly to the red hat, and the red hat responded with eager fulsomeness.  It seemed to be here as it no longer was in the Five Towns; everybody knew everybody!  The red hat and the blue might be titled, after all, he thought.  Then, by sheer accident, the Countess caught sight of himself and stopped dead, bringing her escort to a standstill behind her.  Edward Henry blushed and rose.