Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/132

 Phillips in a whisper, appearing in the dining-room door.

"He might better stay if he can," replied the authority, who happened to be at the nearer end of the table.

"Of course he can," she returned. Of course there was a room for him.

When the party finally reassembled in the drawing-room Cope had disappeared. Mrs. Phillips could now enlarge on his attractiveness as a singer, and could safely assure them—what she herself believed—that they had lost a really charming experience. "If you could only have heard him that Sunday!" she concluded.

Cope had said, of course, "I can get home perfectly well," and, "It's a shame for me to be putting you out this way," and so on and on,—the things you yourself would have said in the circumstances; but he said them with no particular spirit, and was glad, as he walked uncertainly up stairs, that he had not far to go.

Mrs. Phillips indeed "had a room for him." She had rooms a-plenty. There was the chintz chamber on the third floor, where the Irish poet (who seemed not to expect very much for himself) had been put; and there was the larger, handsomer chamber on the second floor, where the Hindoo philosopher (who had loomed up big and important through a vague Oriental atmosphere) had been installed in state. It was a Louis Quinze room, and the bed had a kind of silken canopy and a great deal too much in the way of