"I'm very sorry sir. I didn't like to tell you, sir. I'd hoped I might have got help from the outside, but it seems, sir, the hotels are all the same way." 

 "Do you mean to say," said Mr. Fyshe, speaking very slowly, "that there is no dinner?" 

 "I'm sorry, sir," moaned the waiter. "It appears the chef hadn't even cooked it. Beyond what's on the table, sir, there's nothing." 

 The social catastrophe had come. 

 Mr. Fyshe sat silent with his fist clenched. Dr. Boomer, with his great face transfixed, stared at the empty oyster-shells, thinking perhaps of his college days. The Duke, with his hundred thousand dashed from his lips in the second cup of champagne that was never served, thought of his politeness first and murmured something about taking them to his hotel. 

 But there is no need to follow the unhappy details of the unended dinner. Mr. Fyshe's one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artist to think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of a second-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. The thing must be done over again; he must wait his time and begin anew. 

 And so it came about that the little dinner party of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe dissolved itself into its constituent elements, like broken pieces of society in the great cataclysm portrayed by Mr. Fyshe himself. 

 The Duke was bowled home in a snorting motor to the brilliant rotunda of the Grand Palaver, itself waiterless and supperless. 

 The rector of St. Asaph's wandered off home to his rectory, musing upon the contents of its pantry. 

 And Mr. Fyshe and the gigantic Doctor walked side by side homewards along Plutoria Avenue, beneath the elm trees. Nor had they gone any great distance before Dr. Boomer fell to talking of the Duke. 

 "A charming man," he said, "delightful. I feel extremely sorry for him." 

 "No worse off, I presume, than any of the rest of us," growled Mr. Fyshe, who was feeling in the sourest of democratic moods; "a man doesn't need to be a duke to have a stomach." 

 "Oh, pooh, pooh!" said the president, waving the topic aside with his hand in the air; "I don't refer to that. Oh, not at all. I was thinking of his financial position—an ancient family like the Dulhams; it seems too 

 Prev. P 19/156 next