The hours between
dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough to kill, and the night
after the dance they were further tarnished by the peevishness of
dissipation. Certainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back
in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups
beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was
unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually
fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago
there were no letters for either of the two young men. As every other
person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from
England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and
prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed.
Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-house
when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He went on,
stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses, some
to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some to loathsome
reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of sheep. The intermittent
sounds--now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or throat-clearing, now a
little patter of conversation--were just, he declared, what you hear if
you stand in the lion-house when the bones are being mauled. But these
comparisons did not rouse Hewet, who, after a careless glance round
the room, fixed his eyes upon a thicket of native spears which were so
ingeniously arranged as to run their points at you whichever way you
approached them.
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