The Londoners by Robert Hichens

Lady Drake was a woman of the very strictest propriety. It seems necessary to state the fact at this juncture. She was a woman of the strictest propriety, and, indeed, was inclined to carry respectability to excess, but she was of a hungry disposition. The descendant of an ancient family of large feeders, she very naturally possessed their main characteristic. Her temperament required a good deal of food to be administered to it at frequent intervals, and even in the watches of the night she was by no means certain to be exempt from sudden accesses of what in a man might have been called voracity. To combat these effectually, she usually kept a large supply of biscuits, potted meats, and other necessaries by her bedside, and if she woke at any time, would apply herself to these, banish by their means the promptings of heredity, and then, turning over, fall quietly to sleep again, calmed, nourished, and altogether built up. In the hurry of her departure to Ribton Marches, however, she had omitted to provision herself as was her habit, and, being of a highly sensitive disposition, she did not care to disclose the emptiness of her nocturnal larder to those in charge of the commissariat of the palace. On the Monday night she had managed to secrete a dozen or so of chocolates at dessert, and this booty had secured her from actual starvation, although it had not prevented her from suffering severely during the dark hours. But on Tuesday, the chocolates having given out, and her position at dinner precluding the possibility of another successful raid, her case was sad indeed, and something very like starvation stared her in the face.

Under these circumstances Lady Drake became more acidulated than usual, and worried his Grace during the evening with even more than her normal pertinacity and success. And yet it was her victim who eventually heaped coals of fire upon her neat bandeaux, for it was the Duke who explained to her, in the very moment of her despair, those beautiful inventions placed by the Bun Emperor about his palace for the mechanical feeding of the hungry, and the solace of those who wandered abroad in search of luggage-labels and the reviving pill. Lady Drake went up to bed greatly comforted, and fully resolved that, when the palace was wrapped in slumber, she would fare forth, penny-wise, in search of that sustenance which she would most certainly be requiring long before the men dropped their cigar-ends and went up to their rooms. The men were late in going, and Lady Drake, after one or two furtive expeditions to the head of the stairs, rewarded by hideous visions of Mr. Bush resting beside a glass of whisky-and-water, in despair lay down, and, to her extreme surprise, fell fast asleep.