e much
money on the Stock Exchange. But he's awfully good and kind."

"I think I should like him very much."

"I'll ask you to dine with us quietly some time, but mind, you come
at your own risk; don't blame me if you have a very dull evening."

Chapter VI

But when at last I met Charles Strickland, it was under
circumstances which allowed me to do no more than just make
his acquaintance. One morning Mrs. Strickland sent me round a
note to say that she was giving a dinner-party that evening,
and one of her guests had failed her. She asked me to stop
the gap. She wrote:

"It's only decent to warn you that you will be bored to
extinction. It was a thoroughly dull party from the
beginning, but if you will come I shall be uncommonly grateful.
And you and I can have a little chat by ourselves."

It was only neighbourly to accept.

When Mrs. Strickland introduced me to her husband, he gave me
a rather indifferent hand to shake. Turning to him gaily,
she attempted a small jest.

"I asked him to show him that I really had a husband. I think
he was beginning to doubt it."

Strickland gave the polite little laugh with which people
acknowledge a facetiousness in which they see nothing funny,
but did not speak. New arrivals claimed my host's attention,
and I was left to myself. When at last we were all assembled,
waiting for dinner to be announced, I reflected, while I
chatted with the woman I had been asked to "take in," that
civilised man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on
tedious exercises the brief span of his life. It was the kind
of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled
to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come.
There were ten people. They met with indifference, and would
part with relief. It was, of course, a purely social function.
The Stricklands "owed" dinners to a number of persons,
whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them;
these persons had accepted. Why? To avoid the tedium of
dining <i tete-a-tete>, to give their servants a rest, because
there was no reason to refuse, because they were "owed" a dinner.

The dining-room was inconveniently crowded. There was a K.C.
and his wife, a Government official and his wife,
Mrs. Strickland's sister and her husband, Colonel MacAndrew,
and the wife of a Member of Parliament. It was because the Member
of Parliament found that he could not leave the House that I had
been invited.