[Pg 69]

"Jest in time," he muttered, as Mrs. Bindle was heard descending the stairs. "It's—'Ullo!" he broke off, "'ere's the first appetite," as a knock was heard at the front door.

For the next ten minutes, Mrs. Bindle was busy conducting her guests upstairs to "take off their things." Their escorts waited in the passage, clearing their throats, or stroking their chins. Convention demanded that they should wait to make a formal entry into the parlour with their wives.

With his ear pressed against the kitchen door, Bindle listened with interest, endeavouring to identify from their voices the arrivals as they passed.

By ten minutes past seven, the sounds in the passage had ceased—the guests had all come. In Mrs. Bindle's circle it was customary to take literally the time mentioned in the invitation, and to apologise for even a few minutes' lateness.

In order that the Montagues should not become confused with the Capulets, Bindle had taken the precaution of asking his own friends to come to the back door. He had added that the beer would be in the kitchen.

Mrs. Bindle had always been immovable in her determination that Bindle's "low public-house companions" should not have an opportunity of "insulting" her friends from the Alton Road Chapel.[Pg 70]

[Pg 70]

With Mrs. Bindle the first quarter-of-an-hour of her rare social gatherings was always a period of anguish and uncertainty. Although everybody knew everybody else, all were constrained and ill-at-ease.

Miss Lamb kept twirling her rolled-gold bracelet round her lace-mittened wrist, smiling vacantly the while. Miss Death seemed unable to keep her hard grey eyes, set far too closely together, from the refreshment sideboard, whilst Mrs. Dykes, a tiny woman in a fawn skirt and a coral-pink blouse, was continually feeling the back of her head, as if anticipating some catastrophe to her hair.

Mrs. Hearty, who began in a bright blue satin blouse, and ended in canary-coloured stockings thrust into cloth shoes with paste buckles, beat her breast and struggled for breath. Mr. Hearty was negative, conversationally he was a bankrupt, whilst Mrs. Stitchley was garrulous and with a purpose. She was bent upon talking down the consciousness that she had not been invited.

Her excuse for 

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