Chapter 10 - Page 2

of the feast, had not
quite liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such
people as Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in
dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In
his mind's eye, before the event, they had been the mere
background or padding of the scene, but somehow in reality they
were the most prominent personages there.

After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turner
monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a
lump of chalk was incessantly used--a game those two always played
wherever they were, taking a solitary candle and going to a
private table in a corner with the mien of persons bent on weighty
matters. The rest of the company on this account were obliged to
put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by
in a drawer ever since the time that Gliles's grandmother was
alive. Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back,
produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs
now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wore a
decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an
impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums
than real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively
few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded
on by the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner
from the back of the room:

"And I' will hold' a wa'-ger with you'
That all' these marks' are thirt'-y two!"

accompanied by rapping strokes with the chalk on the table; then
an exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the
commencement of the rhymes anew.

The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a
satisfied sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party
in a patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he
and his were not enjoying themselves.

"Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I
didn't know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy" (to his
wife), "you ought to get some like them for ourselves." And when
they had abandoned cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury
by the fire, it was the timber-merchant who stood with his back to
the mantle in a proprietary attitude, from which post of vantage
he critically regarded Giles's person, rather as a superficies
than as a solid with ideas and feelings inside it, saying, "What a
splendid coat that one is you have on, Giles! I can't get such
coats. You dress better than I."

After supper there was a dance, the bandsmen from Great Hintock
having arrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so
long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not