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Across the small round table sat the railway magnate's dinner-guest, a man who was more than McVickar's match in big-boned, square-shouldered physique, and whose half-century was written only in the thick, grizzled hair and heavy, graying mustaches.
She was dividedly conscious of a desire to laugh and of the notion that she must remain outwardly serious, because though this horrible Pemberton man was talking abject nonsense, she would presently be having him as a dinner-guest. But what if he were not talking nonsense? The possibility, considered, roused a sensation of falling through infinity. "Yes, yes," Patricia civilly assented.
Though familiar, the voice was not associated with the club-restaurant; it must be that of some non-member brought in as the dinner-guest of a member. He could not make out at first whose it was without changing his position, which he disliked to do, the more that the voice excited disagreeable feelings, and by some association not sufficiently distinct to enable him to make out the person.
Among the dinner-guests at Loo, one of those three days, was a Prince of Lippe-Buckeburg, Prince of small territory, but of great speculation; whose territory lies on the Weser, leading to Dutch connections; and whose speculations stretch over all the Universe, in a high fantastic style: he was a dinner-guest; and one of the topics that came up was Freemasonry; a phantasmal kind of object, which had kindled itself, or rekindled, in those years, in England first of all; and was now hovering about, a good deal, in Germany and other countries; pretending to be a new light of Heaven, and not a bog-meteor of phosphorated hydrogen, conspicuous in the murk of things.
A narration or an anecdote should not be long drawn out. A dinner-guest, or a host, or a hostess, is for the time being a conversationalist, not a lecturer. It is the unwritten law of successful dinner-talk that no one person round the table should keep the floor for more than a few short sentences.
There he would have been nothing more than a casual dinner-guest, welcomed for the hour and all but forgotten when he had said good-night. For years he had understood that London offered him no prospect of social advancement. But a night passed under this roof practically raised him to a level whence he surveyed a rich field of possible conquest.
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