Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/92

Rh was gone; my ear caught the last faint sound of its receding wheels. There was no escape. A hen, the most timid of breathing things, is courageous when there is no alternative but "to do or die," and so was I. I begged ten thousand pardons, assured Mr. —— that the dinner was a perfectly unimportant circumstance to me; that I would not lose the only opportunity I might have of seeing Mrs. ——, &c. So, with a dim smile, he gave me his arm, and I entered the dining-room. There were ten or twelve people present. There was an awful silence, an obvious suspension of the whole ceremony of dinner awaiting my decision. My courage was expended; I felt it ebbing, when H., who was sitting next the lady of the house, came to my relief, both hands extended, as if to save a drowning creature. He is, as I have told you before, the very imbodiment of the kindly social principle. He stopped my apologies by assuming that I was the injured party, and dealt his blows to our host and hostess on the right and left. He declared that Mrs. —— wrote a hand no one could decipher. He never, in a long acquaintance, had made out a note of hers, and he was sure I had not been able to tell whether I was invited at six or eight! He would know "how —— had received me." He was certain "he had made some blunder, it was so like him!" I answered, with strict truth, that Mr. —— "had made me feel comfortable in a most uncomfortable position." To my dismay, and in spite of my protestations, Mrs. —— insisted on re-beginning at the Alpha of the dinner