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CHAPTER VI
GEORGE makes a point of refusing to be interviewed. He hates it, unless it is for one of the best papers. Then he says that it is a sheer kindness, and that a successful man has no right to refuse some poor devil or other the chance of making an honest pound or two. So he suffers him gladly. He even is good enough to work on the thing a little in the proof: just to give the poor fellow a lift, and prevent him making a fool of himself and getting his facts all wrong. In the end George writes the whole thing entirely from beginning to end, and makes the man a present of a complete magazine article, and a very fine one too!
“I have been generous,” he tells us. “I have offered myself up as a burnt sacrifice. I have given myself all, without reservation. I have nothing extenuated, everything set down in malice. I have owned to strange sins that I never committed, to idiosyncrasies that took me all my time to invent, and all to bump out an article by some one else. I have been butchered to make a journalistic holiday!”
This is all very nice and self-sacrificing of George, but this particular interview read very well when it came out, and made George seem a very interesting sort of man with some quaint habits, not half so funny as his real ones, though, and I think the interviewer might just as well have given those.
So, when I got a chance of telling the truth, I did, meaning to act for the best, and give Papa a good show and save him the trouble of telling it all himself, but nobody gave me credit for my good intentions, and kind heart.
In the first place, how dared I put myself forward and offer to see George’s visitors! But the young man asked for me—at least, when he was told that George was out, he said might he see one of the young ladies? Of course I don’t suppose that would have occurred to him, only I was leaning over the new aluminium bannisters, and caught his eye. Then an idea seemed to come into his head. The look of disappointment that had come over him when he was told that George was out changed to a little happy perky look, as if he had just thought of something amusing. He crooked his little finger at me as I slid down the bannister, and said would I do? and would he come in? Kate is a cheeky girl, but even the cook admits that Kate is not a patch upon me. Kate evidently didn’t think it quite right, but she slunk away into the back premises, and left me to deal with the young man.
He handed me a card. I thought that very polite of him, and “Mr. Frederick Cook,” and Representative of The Bittern down in the corner, explained it all to me. We take in about a hundred rags, and that’s the name of one of them. It’s called The Bittern because it booms people, so George says.
“I suppose you have come to interview my Father,” I said. “I’m sorry, but he is out. Did you have an appointment?”
“No, I didn’t,” said the young man right out.
I liked his nice bold way of speaking; he was the least shy young man I ever met.
“I don’t believe in appointments. The subject is conscious, primed, braced up, ready with a series of cards, so to speak, which he wishes to force on the patient public—a collection of least characteristic facts which he would like dragged into prominence. It is as if a man should go to the dentist with his mind made up as to the number of teeth that he is to have pulled out, a decision which should always rest with any dentist who respects himself.”
He went running on like that, not a bit shy, or anything, and amused me very much.
“But then the worst of that is, you’ve got no appointment with George, and he is not here to have his teeth pulled out.”
I really so far wasn’t quite sure if he was an interviewer or a dentist, but I kept calm.
“All the better, my dear young lady, that is if you are willing to aid and abet me a little. Then we shall have a thundering good interview, I can promise you. You see, in my theory of interviewing, the actual collaboration of the patient—shall we call him?—is unnecessary. Indeed, it is more in the nature of an impediment. My method, which of course I have very few opportunities of practising, is to seek out his nearest and dearest, those who have the privilege—or annoyance—of seeing him at all hours, at all seasons, unawares. If a painter, ’tis the wife of his brush that I would question; if an author, the partner of his pen—do you take me?”
Yes, I “took” him, and as George had called me a cockatrice—a very favourite term of abuse with him—only that morning, and remembering how she swaggers about being George’s Egeria, I said, “You’ll have to go to Lady Scilly for that!”
“Quite so!” he said very naturally. “Your distinguished parent dedicated his last book to her, did he not? Did you approve, may I ask?”
“No,” I said. “People should always dedicate all their works to their wife, whether they love her or not, that’s what I think!”
“Quite so,” he said again. “I see we agree famously, and between us we shall concoct a splendid interview. But now, if you would be so very good, and happen to have a small portion of leisure at your disposal–”
“I’ll do what I can for you,” I said, delighted at his nice polite way of putting things. “I’ll take you round the house, shall I? Have you a Kodak with you? Would you like to take a snapshot at George’s typewriter?”
“Certainly, if she is pretty,” said the silly man, and I explained that Miss Mander was out, and that it was the machine I meant. He said one machine was very like another, but that if he might see the study, where so many beautiful thoughts had taken shape? He said it quite gravely, but I felt he was laughing in his jacket all the time.
“We’ll take it all seriam!” I said, not wishing him to have all the fine words. “And we will begin at the beginning—I mean the atrium.”
He had a little pocket-book in his hand, and he said, as I led the way through the hall, “You won’t mind my writing things down as they occur to me?”
“Not at all!” I said. “If you will let me look at what you have written. I see you have put a lot already.”
He laughed and handed me his book, and I read—
“Through dusky suites, lit by stained glass windows, whose dim cloistral light, falling on lurid hangings and gorgeous masses of Titianesque drapery, and antique ebon panelling, irresistibly suggest the languorous mysteries of a mediæval palace.... Do you think your father will like this style?”
“You have made it rather stuffy—piled it on a good deal, the drapery and hangings, I mean!” I said. “Now that I know the sort of thing you write, I shan’t want to read any more.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” he said, taking it back. “I’ll read it to you. ‘Behind this arras might lurk Benvenuto and his dagger–’”
“Not Ben’s dagger, but Papa’s bicycle.”
“We’ll leave it there and keep it out of the interview,” he said. “It would spoil the unity of the effect. ‘On, on, through softly-carpeted ante-rooms where the footstep softer falls, than petals of blown roses on the grass....’”
“I hate poetry!” I said. “And we mayn’t walk on that part of the carpet for fear of blurring the Magellanic clouds in the pattern. Do you know anything about Magellanic clouds in carpets?”
“No, I confess I have never trod them before,” he said, becoming all at once respectful to me. I expect he lives in a garret, and has no carpet at all, and I thought I would be good to him, and help him to bump out his article, and not cram him, but tell him where things really came from. So I drew his attention particularly to the aluminium eagle, and the pinchbeck serpent George picked up in Wardour Street. I left out George’s famous yarn about the sack of our ancestral Palace in Turin in the fifteenth century, when the Veros were finally disseminated or dissipated, whichever it is. I don’t believe it myself, but George always accounts for his swarthy complexion by his Italian grandmother. Aunt Gerty says it is all his grandmother, or in other words, all liver!
We went down-stairs into the study, which is the largest room in the house.
“Your father has realized the wish of the Psalmist,” said The Bittern man. “Set my feet in a large room!”
“He likes to have room to spread himself,” I said, “and to swing cats—books in, I mean.”
“So your father uses missiles in the fury of composition?”
“Sometimes; but oftenest he swears, and that saves the books. He mostly swears. Look here!”
I had just found a piece of paper in Miss Mander’s handwriting, and on it was written, “Selections from the nervous vocabulary of Mr. Vero-Taylor during the last hour.”
The Bittern man looked at them, and, “By Jove! these are corkers!” he said. Then I thought perhaps I ought not to have let him see them. There was Drayton, the ironmonger’s bill lying about too, and I saw him raise his eyebrows at the last item, “To one chased brass handle for coal-cellar door.”
“That’s what I call being thorough!” said The Bittern man. “I’m thorough myself. See this interview when it is done!”
He was thorough. He looked at everything, and particularly asked to see the pen George uses. “Or perhaps he uses a stylograph?” he asked.
“Mercy, no!” I screamed out. “He would have an indigestion! This is his pen—at least, it is this week’s pen. George is wasteful of pens; he eats one a week.”
“Very interesting!” said he. “Most authors have a fetish, but I never heard of their eating their fetish before. This will make a nice fat paragraph. Come on!”
You see what friends we had become! We went into the dining-room, and I showed him the dresser, with all the blue china on, and the Turkey carpet spread on it, instead of a white one—that was how they had it in the Middle Ages. He sympathized with me about how uncomfortable Mediæval was, and if it wasn’t for the honour and glory of it, how much we preferred Early Victoria, when the drawers draw, and the mirrors reflect—there’s not one looking-glass in the house that poor Ariadne can see herself in when she’s dressing to go out to a party—or chairs that will bear sitting on. Why, there are four in one room that we are forbidden to sit upon on pain of sudden death!
“Very hard lines!” said The Bittern man. “I confess that this point of view had not occurred to me. I shall give prominence to it in my article. Art, like the car of some fanatical Juggernaut, crushing its votaries–”
“Yes,” I said. “Mother draped a flower-pot once, and sneaked Ariadne’s photograph into a plush frame. You should have heard George! ‘To think that any wife of his—’ ‘Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion!’ And as for Ariadne, he had rather see her dead at his feet than folded in blue plush.”
“Capital!” said The Bittern man. “All good grist for the interview! And now, will you show me the famous metal stairs of which I have heard so much? There are no penalties attached to that, I trust?”
“Except that we are not allowed to go up them—Ariadne and me—without taking our boots off first, for fear of scratching the polish. We have to strip our feet in the housemaid’s pantry, and carry them up in our hands. That’s rather a bore, you will admit!”
“And your father? Does he bow to his own decrees?”
“Oh, no!” I said. “Papa is the exception that proves the rule.”
“Capital!” again remarked The Bittern man. “I am getting to know all about the great Mr. Vero-Taylor in the fierce light that beats upon the domestic hearth! But, by the way,” he said, with a little crooked look at me, “it is usual—shall I say something about Mrs. Vero-Taylor? People generally like an allusion—just a hint of feminine presence—say the mistress of the house flitting about, tending her ferns, or what not?”
“You must put her in the kitchen, then,” I said, “tending her servants. Would you like to see her?”
“I should not like to disturb her,” he said politely. “Will you describe her for me?”
“Oh, mother’s nice and thin—a good figure—I should hate to have one of those feather-beddy mothers, don’t you know? But I don’t really think you need describe her. I don’t think she cares about being in the interview, thank you, but you may say that my sister Ariadne is ravishingly beautiful, if you like?”
“And what about you, Miss–?” he asked, looking at me.
“Tempe Vero-Taylor,” I said. “But whatever you do, don’t put me in! George would have a fit! He won’t much like your mentioning Ariadne, but I don’t see why she shouldn’t have a show, if I can give her one.”
“Very well,” he said. “Your ladyship shall be obeyed. Now I really think I have got enough, unless–” I saw his eyes straying up-stairs.
“There’s nothing much to see up those stairs, except George’s bedroom, and I daren’t take you in there. It is quite commonplace, too; not like the rest of the house, but very, very comfortable.”
“Oho! Your father reminds me of the man who plays Othello, and doesn’t trouble to black more than his face and arms,” said The Bittern man. “And your rooms?”
“Oh, our rooms are cupboards. Bowers, George calls them, and says we have more room to keep our clothes in than the lady of a mediæval castle would have. Now that’s all, and–”
The truth was, I wanted him to go before George came home, for I thought it might be awkward for me if I were found entertaining a newspaper man. George might have preferred to do his own interview, who knows? This reflection only just occurred to me, as all reflections do, too late. The Bittern man was very quick, however, and understood me. He thanked me very much, far more than he need, for on reflection I did not see how he was going to make an interview out of all the scrappy things I had told him, and I said so. He assured me I need be under no uneasiness on that score, that this particular interview would be unique of its kind, and would gain him great credit with his editor, and increase the circulation of the paper. If it had nothing else, he said, it would at least have a succès de scandale, at least I think that is what he said, for I don’t understand French very well. While he was making all those pretty speeches we stood in the hall, and I heard the little grating noise in the lock that meant that George was fitting his key in, and oh, how I just longed to run away! But I didn’t. George opened the door, and came in and shook off his big fur coat. Then he saw The Bittern man and came forward, and The Bittern man came forward too, with his funny little smile on his face that somehow reminds me of the Pied Piper we used to read of when we were little.
“I came from The Bittern,” he said, and George nodded, to show he knew what for. “To ask you to grant me the favour of an interview–”
“I am sorry I happened to be out!” began George, and then I knew, by the sound of his voice, that The Bittern was a good paper. “But if it is not too late, I shall be happy–”
“No need, no need to trouble you now, my dear sir,” the interviewer said, waving his hand a little. “I came, and I go not empty away, but with the material of a dozen articles of sovereign interest in my pocket. You left an admirable locum tenens in the person of your daughter here, who kindly consented to be my cicerone and relieved me of the necessity of troubling you. You will doubtless be relieved also. I shall have the pleasure of sending you a proof to-morrow. Good-day!”
And before George could say what he wanted to say, Mr. Cook had opened the door for himself and had gone. I said he had plenty of cheek. George said so, too, and a great deal worse. I was black and blue for a week, and The Bittern man never sent a proof after all, so when the article came out—“Interviewing, New Style. A Talk with Miss Tempe Vero-Taylor,”—I got some more. That is the first and last time I was ever interviewed. George has peculiar theories about interviewing, I see, and I shall not interfere with them in future. I should think Mr. Frederick Cook would get on, making tools of honest children to serve his ambition like that. George didn’t punish him, of course, he is a power on a paper; while I am but a child in the nursery.
CHAPTER VII
I WONDER if other families have got tame countesses, who come bothering and interfering in their affairs? I don’t mind our having a house-warming party at all, but I do hate that it should be to please Lady Scilly.
“A party! A party!” she said to George, clasping her hands in her silly way. “My party on the table!” like the woman in the play of Ibsen. “Ask all the dear, amusing literary people that I adore. And I’ll bring a large contingent of smart people, if I may, to meet them. Please, please!”
I don’t know what a contingent is, but I fancy it’s something disagreeable. Lady Scilly is George’s friend, not Mother’s. She has only called on Mother once, and that was in the old house, and then Mother was not receiving as they call it, so she has never even seen the mistress of the house where she is going to give the party. Christina Mander, George’s secretary, says that is quite the new way of doing things, and she has been about a great deal, and ought to know.
Miss Mander is a lady. She is very thin, one of those lath-and-plaster women, you know, that seem to live to support a small waist that is their greatest beauty, but when we first knew her, she was plump and jolly-looking. We practically got her for George. Years ago, when we were quite little and had had measles, we were sent down to a sort of boarding-house at Ramsgate to an old lady, an ex-dresser in some theatre Aunt Gerty knew, and who could neither see to mend or to keep us in order, though she got thirty shillings a week for doing it. They never got us up till nine; I suppose the slavey thought sufficient for the day was the evil thereof, and tried to make the evil’s day as short as possible. One morning when it was quite nine, and the sun was shining in, Ariadne and I were feeling frightfully bored, so we got up in our night-gowns, moved a wardrobe, and found a door behind it into another house. It was quite a smart house, with soft plush carpets and nicely-varnished yellow doors. We went all over it. Only the cat was awake, licking herself in the window-seat. The bedroom doors were all shut except one, and we went in and found a nice girl in bed with her gold hair all spread over the pillow. She didn’t seem shocked at us, but laughed, and when we had explained, she wished us to get into the bed beside her. It had sheets trimmed with lace, and her initials, C. M., on the pillow. We did this every morning till we went away. She kept us up, afterwards sending us Christmas cards and so on, and when George advertised for a secretary to help him to sub-edit Wild Oats, she answered it, among the thousand others, and we remembered her name and made George engage her.
She had been to Girton, and to a journalistic school, and Mr. D’Auban’s dancing academy, and to Klondike—where all her hair got cut off, so that she hasn’t enough to spread over the pillow now—and behind the scenes at a music-hall, and a month on the stage, and edited a paper once and wrote a novel. All before she was thirty! At every new arrangement for amusement she made her people opposed her, and prayed for her in church. But she always got her own way in the end. Her mother, Mrs. Stephen Cadwallis Mander, came here to sniff about when George first took Christina on. She is a woman of the world, tortoise-shell pince-nez and all, but she took to Mother at first sight, and talked to her quite naturally about this “new move of dear Christina’s.”
She spoke in a neat, sighing voice, and told us that Christina had developed early, and was so different to her other children; she kept on saying the name of George’s new magazine, as if it shocked her very much.
“Wild Oats! Such a crude name! Though I suppose she must sow them somewhere, and best, perhaps, in the pages of a magazine. You’ll look after her, won’t you? Is there any danger”—she looked towards the study-door”—of her falling in love with her employer?” She laughed carelessly.
“Not the slightest!” said Mother, laughing too. “She will have her eyes opened, that’s all, to the seamy side of artistic life.”
“My daughter is so absurdly curious about that wretched seamy side. After all, it’s only the side that the workers leave the knots on, they must be somewhere, just as plates must be washed up in a scullery. But we don’t need to go in and gloat on the horrid sight!”
“I quite agree with you,” said Mother. “Only if one happens to be the scullery-maid–”
Aunt Gerty came in just then and took her part in the conversation. I was glad to see she was dressed more quietly than usual.
“And,” said Mrs. Mander, “she buys everything that comes out, especially badly-executed magazines that talk about the fore-front of progress and look just as if they were produced in the dark ages. I know that she came to your husband entirely because she wanted to help to edit his magazine—Wild Oats. Is not that its name? From what Chris says, it sounds so very advanced!”
“Oh, very,” said Aunt Gerty. “But it won’t live!”
“You don’t say so?” Mrs. Mander put up her pince-nez and looked at Aunt Gerty, whom she already didn’t like.
“None of my brother-in-law’s things do!” Aunt Gerty went on calmly. “He is a prize wrecker—of women and magazines!”
Mrs. Mander looked startled, and Mother tried to change the conversation.
“Oh, he’s a law unto himself, my brother-in-law is,” went on Aunt Gerty. “But I don’t think he’ll convert Miss Mander to his views.”
“I hope not,” said Mrs. Mander, “for I notice that if you make a law unto yourself, you generally have to make a society unto yourself too! At least as far as women are concerned.”
“People will always let you go your own way,” said Mother; “but the point is, will they come with you—join with you in a pleasant walk?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Mander, “my daughter is the most headstrong of young women. I can’t control her, or you may be sure I should not have allowed her to undertake this post of secretary to Mr. Vero-Taylor.”
“I gathered as much,” said Mother, not offended a bit. “But I will look after her well!” She does; she gives her cod-liver oil every day to make her fat, and breakfast in bed once a week.
Christina says Lady Scilly is a female Mecænas! Ben says she a minx. Ben hates her, because she makes a fool of George, and he says Ariadne is a cad to accept her old dresses and wear them, and go out with her, but then, what is Ariadne to do? She likes to go to parties, and Mother won’t go anywhere, she is quite obstinate about that. I must say that George doesn’t try to persuade her much. You see, he isn’t used to having a wife, socially speaking, after going about as a bachelor all those years!
George agreed to have a party here, to please Lady Scilly, but Christina is quite sure that the idea had occurred to him already, for why should he build a house for purposes of advertisement, and then hide it under a bushel? A successful party is more good than fifty interviews, so she says, and sells an edition. She knows a great deal about geniuses. She says the hermit-plan would not suit George. I asked her what the hermit-plan was. She said she had known an artist, who took a lovely old house in the suburbs of London, and lived there, and never went out; anybody who cared must come out to see him, and then it was not so easy, for his Sundays were only for a select few—very selected. He only gave tea and bread-and-butter—very little butter—and no table-cloth—plain living, and high prices, for his pictures cost a lot, though he pretended he did not care if he sold them or not; in fact, it cut him to the heart to see any of them go out into the great cold brutal world, and he never exhibited in exhibitions, but in an empty room in his own house. He said, in fun, I suppose, that if the Academy were to elect him to be an R.A., he should put the matter into the hands of his solicitors. The end of that man was, she said, that he did become a Royal Academician, quite against his will, and princes and princesses of the blood used to come and have tea with him, without a table-cloth. But that would not do for George, for he isn’t at all hermit-like, and he can make epigrams! They say that is his forte. I hate them myself, I think they are rude, and only a clever way of hurting people’s feelings so that they can’t complain, but then, of course, the family gets them in the rough; epigrams, like charity, begin at home.
George began to talk a great deal about the duty of entertaining. He said a man owed it to his century. And his party must be something out of the common run; it must be individual and exceptional. He thought he would give a party like the ones they gave in the Middle Ages. Judging from what he said, I think that it must have been very uncomfortable, and very expensive, for to be really grand you had to have cygnets and peacocks to eat. People stood about round the sides of the room, or sat on the floor or on coffers, and before the evening was half over the smoke from the flambeaux made it impossible for them to see each other’s faces! That didn’t suit Ariadne at all, and she snubbed the idea as much as she could.
Luckily, George changed his mind, and then it was to be a supper, still Mediæval, at six o’clock. We should have had to eat with our fingers, because only the carver has a fork, and he sometimes lends it, but it can’t go all round. That’s the reason we have finger-bowls now, and little bits of bread beside our plates instead of big bits of brown to eat off. And when you were done, did you eat the plate? As far as I can see, everybody handed everybody they loved nice pieces off their own trenchers and drank out of the same glasses, so the fewer persons that loved one the better I should have liked it. You should have seen Mother’s face when the middle-aged menu was explained to her! She said she would do what she could, but how was she going to put the grocers’ and the butchers’ shops back a century?
The first course, George explained, was quite easy—it was little bits of toast with honey and hypocras.
“Perhaps they will know what that is at the Stores?” Mother said, meaning to be funny. “There’s a very civil young man there might help me?”
“Next course, smoked eels,” went on George. “Any soup you like, only it must be flavoured with verjuice. That is the third course. Then you have venison, rabbits, pigeons, fricasseed beans, river crabs, sorrel, oranges, capers in vinegar–”
“It will relieve us for ever of the burden of entertaining for ever and ever, that’s one good thing!” Mother said, “for nobody will care to try that menu twice!”
“It would look well in the papers, though,” George said. “What do you say to barbecued pig?”
But Mother would have nothing to say to barbecued pig, and George and Lady Scilly finally settled that it was to be a masked ball, costume not obligatory, but masks and dominos imperative, with a cold collation at twelve o’clock, and all the guests to unmask then.
The date was chosen to please her, and it was changed three times, but at last it was fixed, and George got some cards printed that he had designed himself. They were quite white and plain, but with a knowing red splotch in one corner, which signified George’s passionate Italian nature. I was in the study when the first dozens of packets came, with Miss Mander, and she undid them. Secretaries always take the right to open everything!
“My Goodness!” she said.
“Isn’t it right?” I asked, getting hold of it, but when I had looked at it I was no wiser, for I couldn’t see what was wrong. There it was, written out very nicely, “Mr. Vero-Taylor At Home. Wednesday the twenty-first,” and the address in the corner, and all those rules about the dominos, and that was all.
“Oh, dear darling Christina,” I begged, deadly curious, “do tell me what is wrong with that? I cannot guess.”
“It’s just as well, perhaps,” she said. “Preserve your sublime ignorance, my dear child, as long as you can.”
And not another word could I get out of her! I suppose she calls that being loyal to her employer.
I told Ben, and he said he knew, and what was more, he would go one better. He got hold of one of the cards, and altered it. And then it was Mr. Vero-Taylor and Lady Scilly At Home! I think that was absurd, for though Lady Scilly meddles in all our affairs, she doesn’t quite live here yet! and Mother does, and what’s more, Mother never goes out at all except to take a servant’s character, or scold the butcher, or something of the sort, so she is really the one at home! Christina took it from him, and looked at it, and I’ll swear I saw her smile before she tore it up. So Ben had me there, for he still wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with the first card.
We began to write in the names of the people. It took us a whole morning, Ben, Ariadne, Miss Mander and I. I offered to help, and really, though I write rather badly, I can spell better than any of them, but I don’t believe they valued my help very much, and only gave me a card now and then to keep me quiet. There were six young men that Ariadne wanted asked—six, no less, if you please—and she’s only been out six months! And she kept trying to force them on George, same as you do cards in a card trick! But he didn’t take any notice, and kept walking up and down the room mentioning the names of all sorts of absurd people that nobody wanted, except himself. It was really going to be a very smart party; there were to be detectives and reporters, and what more can you have than that? All the countesses and dukes and so on were to come, of course, but I must say I had thought that George knew a great many more of them; he managed to scratch up so few, considering all the talk there had been about it. I kept saying, “Oh, do give me a Countess to ask. You give me all the plain people to do.”
Somehow or other, George did not seem to be pleased, and he sent us all away after fifty had been written.
Next day, he told us that he had thought it all out, and he was going to do an original thing, and instead of sending out cards for his party, he was going to announce it in the pages of The Bittern, and that all his friends, reading it, must consider themselves bidden. Mother said how should she know how many to prepare for? I suppose the answer to that depends on the number of friends George has got, and whether they know that he considers them his friends. For think how awkward to assume that you were a friend and had a place laid for you, and then to come and find that you were only an acquaintance. I suggested that the real friends should have a hot sit-down supper, with wine, while the acquaintances should only go to a buffet and have cold pressed beef and lemonade. There should be a password, Hot with, and cold without, and they roared when I told them this, but I didn’t see why. Then the party would really be of some use, for after it people would know where they were! But how about the newspaper people? They couldn’t call themselves friends, or even acquaintances, so they wouldn’t be able to come at all, and what would George do then? I said all this, which seems to me very sensible, but no one noticed it. And the detectives! They have to be paid for coming, surely, and I’d rather see them than any of the others. “If they don’t come the party will be spoilt for me,” I said to Christina.
