The Londoners by Robert Hichens

When ten people, eight of whom are labouring under delusions or suffering from engrossing mental complications, dine in company, and the banquet is supervised by a gentleman who is almost off his head, complete calm and the perfection of easy gaiety are not certain to ensue. There was, in fact, a good deal of constraint prevalent that night at Ribton Marches, constraint, however, varied by strange outbursts that kept things going, but scarcely kept them going in the average way of ordinary society. Only Miss Bindler and Mr. Ingerstall were fairly fancy-free that Wednesday night. Mrs. Verulam was abstracted because she wanted terribly to speak in private to Chloe, and inform her of Lord Bernard's letter to Mr. Rodney and of its strange contents. Chloe was abstracted because of the paragraph in the _World_, and the probable presence of the fatal Huskinson in England. The Duchess of Southborough was glowering with respectable fury against her hostess, and solicitude over the supposed wrongs of her gouty girl. The Lady Pearl was in a condition of highly-wrought sensibility to the fascinations of Chloe. Lady Drake was petrified by the knowledge that the Duke thought her what she wasn't, and that Mr. Bush had beheld her in an Indian shawl at half-past three in the morning. The Duke could think of nothing with any comfort except the five self-conscious gardeners now engaged, as he supposed, in ruining the Emperor's domain. Mr. Rodney, who believed himself to be in the incipient stage of rheumatic fever, looked like a corpse whose mind was seriously affected, and spoke like a voice reverberating from a sepulchre.

And Mr. James Bush, who was seated next to the Duchess, was rent asunder by two contending passions, a desire to hint delicately to her Grace that she was supposed to be in love with him, and a desire to flee at once from the machinations of policemen to the marshy solitudes of peaceful Bungay. Pride and cowardice in fact contended in the paragon's mighty bosom, and almost succeeded in rendering him slightly volcanic. To crown the tragic humours of the feast, Mr. Harrison, very near to madness, stood during its progress with his feet turned out in the first position in the neighbourhood of an enormous sideboard, his face contorted into an expression of hysterical vigilance, his hands straying hither and thither among the glittering knives and forks which the Bun Emperor always had displayed as dining-room ornaments, even if Mrs. Lite were only eating a piece of thin bread and butter alone in the cedar-wood parlour.