"You'll have coffee, Mr. Batchgrew?" said the hostess.
Secretly enchanted by the sweet word "missis," Rachel was nevertheless piqued by this refusal.
"Oh, but you must have some of Louise's coffee," said Louis, standing negligently in front of the fire.
Already, though under a month old as a husband, Louis, following the eternal example of good husbands, had acquired the sure belief that his wife could achieve a higher degree of excellence in certain affairs than any other wife in the world. He had selected coffee as Rachel's speciality.
"Louise's?" repeated old Batchgrew, puzzled, in his heavy voice.
"He calls me Louise, you know," said she.
"Calls you Louise, does he?" Batchgrew muttered indifferently. But he took a cup of coffee, stirred part of its contents into the saucer and on to the Chesterfield, and began to sup the remainder with a prodigious splutter of ingurgitation.
"And you must have a cigarette, too," Louis carelessly insisted. And Mr. Batchgrew agreed, though it was notorious that he only smoked once in a blue moon, because all tobacco was apt to be too strong for him.
"You can clear away," Rachel whispered, in the frigid tones of one accustomed to command cohorts of servants in the luxury of historic castles.
"Yes, ma'am," Mrs. Tams whispered back nervously, proud as a major-domo, though with less than a major-domo's aplomb.
No pride, however, could have outclassed Rachel's. She had had a full day, and the evening was the crown of the day, because in the evening she was entertaining privately for the first time. She was the one lady of the party; for these two men she represented woman, and they were her men. They depended on her for their physical well-being, and not in vain. She was the hostess; hers to command; hers the complex responsibility of the house. She had begun supper with painful timidity, but the timidity had now nearly vanished in the flush of social success. Critical as only a young wife can be, she was excellently well satisfied with Louis' performance in the role of host. She grew more than ever sure that there was only one Louis. See him manipulate a cigarette--it was the perfection of worldliness and agreeable, sensuous grace! See him hold a match to Mr. Batchgrew's cigarette!