Daughter of the House. “OH, MUMMY ONLY SETS HIM ON TO IT WHEN HE’S BEEN NAUGHTY.”]

* * * * *

THE BEST OF THINGS.

“The New Poor?” said Holder, like myself, one of them.  “Nonsense.  There are none.  There are people who will not use their imaginations, of course.  They are poor, but not newly so.  This so-called new poverty doesn’t touch me.  True, the money I make will not go so far as it used to, but my imagination goes very much farther.  I have trained it, encouraged it, my wife’s and boy’s too.  We have cast off the absurd restraints imposed by the law of probability.  In the old days, when I used to think, say, of motors, I was invariably badgered by the spectre of improbability.  I used to think of a four-hundred-pound car, or perhaps, in a daring moment, my thoughts would creep timidly, like mice out into a still kitchen, on to the six-hundred-pound plane, only to scurry back to the lower plane almost instantly. Now I’ve thrown all that overboard.  Rubbish!  When I think of motors I think in terms of Rolls-Royces.  Why think cheaply?  It’s a poor imagination that won’t run to a six-cylinder car at least.  Strictly, I shall never own a real motor scooter.  What of it?  In my mind I use Rolls-Royces.  We’ve rather worked the thing up at home.  Come and dine with us and see for yourself.”

We had sausages and mashed potatoes, with water.  And I may say that never have I enjoyed a meal more.  You see, Holder kept on telling us all the time about the famous dinner which now, owing to the War, we should never really eat, but which we were at perfect liberty to imagine we were eating.  I am sorry you were not there.  The hors d’oeuvres!  Holder describes hors d’oeuvres better than any man I know.  Oh, masterly, the colour ...  RUSKIN, perhaps.  Anyhow, he carried us quite away.

His wife chose oysters.  His description of oysters, instantly furnished, was a little gem—­a pearl, silver-grey, so much so that I too chose oysters.  His little boy, Dickie, chose caviare; but he really did not care for it.  He bit on a piece of button in his sausage, poor child.  That was why he did not appreciate the caviare.  But Holder distracted his mind with some very remarkable mushroom soup—­potage de champignons—­a brilliant word-sketch.  We all chose it.

For fish there was saus—­pardon me, sole.  The little lad, Dickie, chose salmon; but Holder reminded him that he had had salmon the previous evening; it was out of season in any case, and he described how the sole tasted that probably Dickie will never touch.  The boy appeared to enjoy it immensely.

I think it was the game, simple roast partridges, exquisitely cooked, which Mrs. Holder enjoyed most.  Her eyes were frankly shining as she pensively chewed the third quarter of her sausage, and she thrilled to the juices of the partridge of the dinner she could no longer hope really to eat, but which Holder, thank God, would often describe, at any rate until a tax is put on conversation.  Even then something might be done—­deaf and dumb language, possibly—­an evasion, I admit, but even the New Poor must eat occasionally.