Cyril, while attending steadily to the demands of his body, was in a mood which approached the ideal.  Proud and radiant, he combined urbanity with a certain fine condescension.  His bright eyes, and his manner of scraping up jam with a spoon, said:  “I am the king of this party.  This party is solely in my honour.  I know that.  We all know it.  Still, I will pretend that we are equals, you and I.”  He talked about his picture-books to a young woman on his right named Jennie, aged four, pale, pretty, the belle in fact, and Mr. Critchlow’s grand-niece.  The boy’s attractiveness was indisputable; he could put on quite an aristocratic air.  It was the most delicious sight to see them, Cyril and Jennie, so soft and delicate, so infantile on their piles of cushions and books, with their white socks and black shoes dangling far distant from the carpet; and yet so old, so self-contained!  And they were merely an epitome of the whole table.  The whole table was bathed in the charm and mystery of young years, of helpless fragility, gentle forms, timid elegance, unshamed instincts, and waking souls.  Constance and Samuel were very satisfied; full of praise for other people’s children, but with the reserve that of course Cyril was hors concours.  They both really did believe, at that moment, that Cyril was, in some subtle way which they felt but could not define, superior to all other infants.

Some one, some officious relative of a visitor, began to pass a certain cake which had brown walls, a roof of cocoa-nut icing, and a yellow body studded with crimson globules.  Not a conspicuously gorgeous cake, not a cake to which a catholic child would be likely to attach particular importance; a good, average cake!  Who could have guessed that it stood, in Cyril’s esteem, as the cake of cakes?  He had insisted on his father buying it at Cousin Daniel’s, and perhaps Samuel ought to have divined that for Cyril that cake was the gleam that an ardent spirit would follow through the wilderness.  Samuel, however, was not a careful observer, and seriously lacked imagination.  Constance knew only that Cyril had mentioned the cake once or twice.  Now by the hazard of destiny that cake found much favour, helped into popularity as it was by the blundering officious relative who, not dreaming what volcano she was treading on, urged its merits with simpering enthusiasm.  One boy took two slices, a slice in each hand; he happened to be the visitor of whom the cake-distributor was a relative, and she protested; she expressed the shock she suffered.  Whereupon both Constance and Samuel sprang forward and swore with angelic smiles that nothing could be more perfect than the propriety of that dear little fellow taking two slices of that cake.  It was this hullaballoo that drew Cyril’s attention to the evanescence of the cake of cakes.  His face at once changed from calm pride to a dreadful anxiety.  His eyes bulged out.  His tiny mouth grew and grew, like a mouth in a nightmare.  He was no longer human; he was a cake-eating tiger being balked of his prey.  Nobody noticed him.  The officious fool of a woman persuaded Jennie to take the last slice of the cake, which was quite a thin slice.