n it during the middle
of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity.

The dinner went off very well. Rose was charming in a pink silk blouse
with lace at her throat and wrists. Her face too was pink with a flush
of anxiety and excitement. As for George, she had never seen him look so
handsome. She could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his
beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. He was enjoying his
birthday like a child, and laughing--she had never heard him laugh like
that in her life before. He laughed most at the very things she thought
would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the
dinner-plates from Mr. Nicholson's hands on to the floor at Uncle's feet
in the doorway, and Uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. The
dinner, too; she had been afraid that George wouldn't like all his
friends to know she'd cooked it. But he told them all straight out,
laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? And they all said
that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that
she had worried and trembled over. And though she had cooked the dinner,
she hadn't got to wait. Not one of the gentlemen would let her. Rose
became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came
she felt that she could talk a little.

For Nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. His right ear,
patient and attentive, leaned toward Tanqueray's wife, while his left
strained in agony to catch what Tanqueray was saying. Tanqueray was
talking to Jane. He had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had
been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded?

"Minded? After your letter? When a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up
on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me,
and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think I hear the
little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my
legs?"

Rose at Nicky's right was saying, "It's over small for a dinin'-room.
But you should see 'is study."

He bowed an ear that did not hear her.

"Nicky did me well," said Tanqueray.

"I told you all the time," said Jane, "that Nicky knew."

"'E couldn't do anything without 'is study."

"Ah?" Nicky returned to the little woman, all attention.

"Aren't you proud of him? Isn't it splendid how he's brought them round?
How they're all praising him?"

"So they'd ought to," Rose sai