Austen Chamberlain, who likes to let tear-bedewed rays of youthful sentimentality shine about his coldly calculating businessman’s intellect but always has in mind the interest of his fatherland, was the triumphator of the day.
The dinner was in the best French manner—choice fruit, and wines of the greatest variety and richness; melon, with boiled beef as usual; coffee after dinner, without cream, and a small glass of liqueur called chasse-café, after it.
If this is a distortion of reality, it is a knowingly utopian gesture, and the wit of such conceits lies in placing in tension the ideal with the real and so being more than a series of fancy ‘meet cutes’: […]
He has no time to dress, but snatching his jacket and trowsers in hand flies off. Tom Pipes gives chace, and mercy on the jacketless shoulders if he comes within arm’s length of them.
