being pointed out to her that she wasn't supposed to have any other.

Finally the evening came and everything was ready. Fong's talents,
after years of disuse, rose in the passion of the artist and produced a
feast worthy of the past. A florist decorated the table and the lower
floor. Mother's jewels were taken out of the safety deposit box, and
Lorry and Chrystie, in French costumes with their hair dressed so that
they looked like strangers, gazed upon each other in the embowered
drawing-room realizing that they had brought it upon themselves and
must see it through.

The start was far from promising; none of them seemed able to live up to
it. Aunt Ellen kept following the strange waiters with suspicious eyes,
then looking down the glittering table at Lorry like a worried dog. And
Chrystie, who had been all blithe expectation up to the time she dressed,
was suddenly shattered by nervousness, making detached, breathless
remarks about the weather and then drinking copious draughts of water. As
for Lorry, she felt herself so small and shriveled that her new dress
hung on her in folds and her mouth was so dry she could hardly
articulate.

It was awful. The guests seemed to feel the blight and wither under it,
eating carefully as if fearing sounds of mastication might intrude on the
long, recurring silences. There was a time when Lorry thought she
couldn't bear it, had a distracted temptation to leap to her feet, say
she was faint and rush from the place. Then came the turn in the
tide--Mr. Mayer, the strange man Mrs. Kirkham had produced, did it. She
had noticed that he alone seemed free from the prevailing discomfort,
looked undisturbed and calm, glancing at the table, the guests, herself
and Chrystie. But it was not until the fish that he started to talk. It