without waiting for a reply:

"Because if you are not, you might spend it with us. You know,
perhaps, that I have a little friend, a dear little soul."

It sounded all right and he accepted the invitation on condition that
they should both be invited. Well, but of course, what else did he
think? And this settled the problem of friends and Christmas Eve.

They met at six o'clock at the friend's flat, and while the two "old
men" had a glass of punch, the women went into the kitchen.

All four helped to lay the table. The two "old men" knelt on the floor
and tried to lengthen the table by means of boards and wedges. The
women were on the best of terms at once, for they felt bound together
by that very obvious tie which bears the great name of "public opinion."
They respected one another and saved one another's feelings. They
avoided those innuendoes in which husbands and wives are so fond
of indulging when their children are not listening, just as if they
wanted to say: "We have a right to say these things now we are
married."

When they had eaten the pudding, the barrister made a speech praising
the delights of one's own fireside, that refuge from the world and
from all men: that harbour where one spends one's happiest hours in
the company of one's real friends.

Mary-Louisa began to cry, and when he urged her to tell him the cause
of her distress, and the reason of her unhappiness, she told him in a
voice broken by sobs that she could see that he was missing his mother