Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/210

 for the occasion, and had decided to make people draw lots in a cheery happy-go-lucky way. 'It's wonderful what a difference it makes to the success of a dinner,' Berengaria told me. 'Now, every time I dine out I have to go down with the host, and he is generally without exception the dullest man in the room, and when we give a dinner there is bound to be some old fogey we have to invite, and of course I have to go down with him. It's dreadfully dull, and I have never been down to dinner yet with the nicest men in the station except when I've had them to dine in a quiet informal sort of way. Now about this Christmas dinner there is such a delightful uncertainty. It's just a lottery. You never know your luck. You may get somebody nice to go in with, or you may not. I always make people draw names like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, etc. A Juliet fat and forty adds to the merriment of things.' After breakfast Berengaria asked me to write out names like those on little slips of paper to be drawn when the time came. I was sitting racking my brains and trying to remember how famous people ran in couples when several callers were announced. Young Mr. de Vere Smith de Vere was one of them, and he at once attached himself to me, and of course saw what I was doing. Now, Mr. de Vere Smith de Vere had been honouring me with his attentions quite markedly during the few days I had been in Slumpanugger, to the entire neglect of his old love, Miss Proudfoot. He was one of those dreadfully self-satisfied young men with