Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/187

 Her husband looked like a bad copy of an inferior portrait of Christ. His face was the color of plasticene, and it was framed with a dank, straggling beard. He wore brown spectacles and baggy black clothes and gave the impression that life in him was sustained only by recourse to lime-water and underdone spaghetti. Each Racicot held a child by the hand: a clay-faced boy of fourteen with absorbent cotton in his ear and a bridge across his teeth, and a little girl who clutched a tiny red leather handbag and kept curtseying in a panic. She also kept dancing from one leg to the other and had to be removed in the interests of hygiene.

After voluble compliments and countless amenities, the Racicots sank exhausted into various golden receptacles, whereupon there began a process of declining a number of beverages. M. Racicot, it appeared, drank no alcool, ate no meat, and abjured tobacco. His wife, like the wife of Jack Spratt, had a complementary list of abstentions, with a physiological justification for each, and the hearty, hospitable Casimir was being reduced to despair when the youngest Racicot, now at ease, was overheard to say that she would like some grenadine.

"Ah!" cried their host in relief, and shouted for Rosalie.

Rosalie was engaged in admitting two more visitors, whom Grover had once before encountered in this house: two nipped-in-the-bud souls whose harmless curiosities ran along the roomy grooves set for them