game-pies and oysters for ever!

They were in the midst of breakfast, their voices a little subdued because
mama was not well, yet with an enjoyable sense of freedom because papa,
who was so often irritable at that meal, had not yet come down, when
suddenly the door opened and without any announcement Mr. George Boult
walked in.

He was a man they all knew as a friend and associate of the master of the
house, but he had never been held in favour by its mistress nor her
children, who indeed had but the slightest acquaintance with him. He had
been a school-fellow of William Day's at the Brockenham Grammar School; a
kind of comradeship had existed between the two from that time till now.
George Boult had assumed for years the habit of dropping in at Queen Anne
Street on Sunday afternoons to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of wine
with the lawyer, but it was a function the men had enjoyed _tete-a-tete_:
as an intimate in the family circle he had not been admitted.

Boult could have bought up all the superior people who turned up their
noses at him, his friend frequently declared; it had been a standing
grievance of his against his wife that she declined to put Mr. Boult's
name on the list of people invited to her parties.

George Boult was a self-made man; the process of manufacture recent, and
unfortunately fresh in people's minds. "If I invite the man who keeps the
draper's shop the professional people won't come to meet him," Mrs. Day
pointed out, and remained obdurate on the point. But because he, who did
not in the least wish to go to her parties, could not be invited to them,
a little awkwardness in the relations of her husband's Sunday afternoon
visitor and Mrs. Day had arisen.