"
The servant was still waiting a favourable opportunity to announce
me. I gave her a shilling not to, and got away unperceived.
After a satisfactory dinner, he would suggest an impromptu dance,
and want you to roll up mats, or help him move the piano to the
other end of the room.
He knew enough round games to have started a small purgatory of his
own. Just as you were in the middle of an interesting discussion,
or a delightful tete-a-tete with a pretty woman, he would swoop
down upon you with: "Come along, we're going to play literary
consequences," and dragging you to the table, and putting a piece
of paper and a pencil before you, would tell you to write a
description of your favourite heroine in fiction, and would see
that you did it.
He never spared himself. It was always he who would volunteer to
escort the old ladies to the station, and who would never leave
them until he had seen them safely into the wrong train. He it was
who would play "wild beasts" with the children, and frighten them
into fits that would last all night.
So far as intention went, he was the kindest man alive. He never
visited poor sick persons without taking with him in his pocket
some little delicacy calculated to disagree with them and make them
worse.
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