but to go to dinner in ten minutes. We agreed; but when we'd
hurriedly washed our hands and faces and assembled at the rendezvous,
there was no Mrs. West. Basil was the only one who didn't look
surprised. Ten more minutes passed, perhaps, giving us time to think how
hungry we were too, and then the lady appeared. She hadn't exactly
dressed, but she had done something to herself which made her look fresh
and lovely and elaborate, in contrast to Mrs. James and me.

"Dear people!" she exclaimed, "I'm so sorry if I've kept you waiting,
but I simply couldn't find a _thing_; and the more haste, the less
speed, you know. Mr. Somerled, you've been here before in your
pre-American days. Do, like an angel-man, show me the way to the
dining-room. I can never get used to going in late, with a lot of people
staring. Basil will take care of Barrie and Mrs. James."

I felt as if I should go mad and bite something if she were to cultivate
the habit of calling me "Barrie"; but as I'd invited both her brother
and Sir S. to do so, and Mrs. James had never called me anything else, I
couldn't very well make Mrs. West the one exception.

A good many of the hotel guests had finished dinner by that time, but
twenty or thirty were still at their tables in the big dining-room,
which seemed to me absolutely palatial after my "glass retort."
Evidently we were well in the thick of "tourist zone" again, judging by
the look of the people, for most of them had the air of having travelled
half round the world in powerful and luxurious motor-cars. You could see
they weren't "local"--with four exceptions, our nearest neighbours. I
thought they were pets; but Mrs. West stared in that pale-eyed way I
noticed women have when they wish to express superiority or contempt.

All four of the pets were old--two very old, two elderly. The first pair
wore bonnets which they must have had for years, things that perched
irrelevantly on the tops of their heads, and looked entirely extraneous.
The second two had something more or less of the hat tribe, and Sir S.
said this was because their elders considered them girls, and granted
them the right to be frivolous in order to attract the opposite sex.
Mrs. West was sure that such headgear couldn't be got for love or money
except in small remote Scottish towns. "Might come from Thrums," said
Sir S. I'd never heard of Thrums, and Basil explained that it was a
famous place in a novel, written by a man of my name, Barrie.