hen Florence said: "And so the whole round table is begun."
Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his throat; but Leonora
shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave. And I was
passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls. Avanti!...

IV

So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity. They were
characterized by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the
part of the Ashburnhams to which we, on our part, replied by leaving out
quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note.
Indeed, you may take it that what characterized our relationship was an
atmosphere of taking everything for granted. The given proposition was,
that we were all "good people." We took for granted that we all liked
beef underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good
liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine
wine qualified with Fachingen water--that sort of thing. It was also
taken for granted that we were both sufficiently well off to afford
anything that we could reasonably want in the way of amusements fitting
to our station--that we could take motor cars and carriages by the day;
that we could give each other dinners and dine our friends and we could
indulge if we liked in economy. Thus, Florence was in the habit of
having the Daily Telegraph sent to her every day from London. She was
always an Anglo-maniac, was Florence; the Paris edition of the New York
Herald was always good enough for me. But when we discovered that
the Ashburnhams' copy of the London paper followed them from England,
Leonora and Florence decided between them to suppress one subscription
one year and the other the next. Similarly it was the habit of the Grand
Duke of Nassau Schwerin, who came yearly to the baths, to dine once with
about eighteen families of regular Kur guests. In return he would give a
dinner of all the eighteen at once. And, since these dinners were rather
expensive (you had to take the Grand Duke and a good many of his suite
and any members of the diplomatic bodies that might be there)--Florence
and Leonora, putting their heads together, didn't see why we shouldn't
give the Grand Duke his dinner together. And so we did. I don't suppose
the Serenity minded that economy, or even noticed it. At any rate, our
joint dinner to the Royal Personage gradually assumed the aspect of a
yearly function. Indeed, it grew larger and larger, until it became a
sort of c