“I think,” said Mrs. Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite, while the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, and he, not accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touched the bell.

There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life, save the reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved the mutton, that if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after Sunday passed, if men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members of Parliament, business men—­if no don ever gave a luncheon party—­

“Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?” he asked the young man next him, to break a silence which had already lasted five minutes and a half.

“I don’t know, sir,” said the young man, blushing very vividly.

At this moment in came Mr. Flanders.  He had mistaken the time.

Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a second helping of cabbage.  Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his meat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or twice to measure his speed—­only he was infernally hungry.  Seeing this, Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind—­and the tart was brought in.  Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton.  She glanced at the mutton.  Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.

It was none of her fault—­since how could she control her father begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder?  What was at the top of the ladder?  A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the ladder.

“I was down at the races yesterday,” she said, “with my two little girls.”

It was none of their fault either.  In they came to the drawing-room, in white frocks and blue sashes.  They handed the cigarettes.  Rhoda had inherited her father’s cold grey eyes.  Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was an abstract light.  He could talk about Persia and the Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests.  Books were on his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious six-penny weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots—­the weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry—­melancholy papers.

“I don’t feel that I know the truth about anything till I’ve read them both!” said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous.