library, where, in a room rich with costly bindings, and smelling
pleasantly of leather, and warmly yellow with the light of two
shaded lamps, he would find his uncle reading before a crackling
wood fire. What followed was almost a formula, an exquisite
presentation of stately manners, an exquisite avoidance of any topic
which might cause a real discussion. The dinner was invariably gentle,
persuasive, a thoughtful gastronomic achievement. Heaven might
become confused about its weather, and about wars, and things like
that, but Mr. McCain never became confused about his menus. He had a
habit of commending wine. "Try this claret, my dear fellow, I want
your opinion.... A drop of this Napoleonic brandy won't hurt you a
bit." He even sniffed the bouquet before each sip; passed, that is,
the glass under his nose and then drank. But Adrian, with a
preconceived image of the personality back of this, and the memory
of too many offences busy in his mind, saw nothing quaint or amusing.
His gorge rose. Damn his uncle's wines, and his mushrooms, and his
soft-footed servants, and his house of nuances and evasions, and his
white grapes, large and outwardly perfect, and inwardly sentimental
as the generation whose especial fruit they were. As for himself, he
had a recollection of ten years of poverty after leaving college; a
recollection of sweat and indignities; he had also a recollection of
some poor people whom he had known.

Afterward, when the dinner was over, Adrian would go home and awake
his wife, Cecil, who, with the brutal honesty of an honest woman,
also some of the ungenerosity, had early in her married life flatly
refused any share in the ceremonies described. Cecil would lie in
her small white bed, the white of her boudoir-cap losing itself in
the white of the pillow, a little sleepy and a little angrily
perplexed at the perpetual jesuitical philosophy of the male.