ss
Wangle, whilst Mr. Bolton threatened to report Mr. Sefton to the Food
Controller. Gustave created a diversion by arriving with the soup.
His white cotton gloves, several sizes too large even for his hands,
caused him great anxiety. Every spare moment during the evening he
spent in clutching them at the wrists, just as they were on the point
of slipping off. Nothing, however, could daunt his courage or mitigate
his good-humour. For the first time in his life he was waiting upon a
real lord, and from the circumstance he was extracting every ounce of
satisfaction it possessed.

In serving Bowen his attitude was that of one self-convicted of
unworthiness. Accustomed to the complaints and bickerings of a
Bayswater boarding-house, Bowen's matter-of-fact motions of acceptance
or refusal impressed him profoundly. So this was how lords behaved.
Nothing so impressed him as the little incident of the champagne.

At Galvin House it was the custom for the guests to have their own
drinks. Mr. Cordal, for instance, drank what the label on the bottle
announced to be "Gumton's Superior Light Dinner Ale." Mrs.
Mosscrop-Smythe favoured Guinness's Stout, Miss Sikkum took hot water,
whilst Miss Wangle satisfied herself with a claret bottle. There is
refinement in claret, the dear bishop always drank it, with water: but
as claret costs money Miss Wangle made a bottle last for months.

The thought of the usual heterogeneous collection of bottles on the
occasion of Lord Peter's visit had filled Mrs. Craske-Morton with
horror, and she had decided to "spring" wine, as Mr. Bolton put it. In
other words, she supplied for the whole company four bottles of
one-and-eightpenny claret, the bottles rendered beautifully old by
applied dust and cobwebs. To this she had added a bottle of grocer's
champagne for Bowen. Gustave had been elaborately instructed that this
was for the principal guest and the principal guest only, and Mrs.
Craske-Morton had managed to convey to him in some subtle way that if
he poured so much as a drop of the precious fluid into any other
person's glass, the consequences would be too terrifying even to
contemplate.

Whilst Galvin House was murmuring softly over its soup, Gustave
approached Bowen with the champagne bottle swathed in a white napkin,
and looking suspiciously like an infant in long clothes. Holding the
end of the bottle's robes with the left hand so that it should not
tickle Bowen's ear, Gustave b