Sweet Confusion [antikvár]

Things were not going too well in Lassiter Street. The fact, disclosed by Charles Ellistone in these careful terms, manifested itself in remote and apparently disassociated ways. Alicia Ellistone, who was reputed for years to have lived on half her income, substituted potted meat for foie gras at her bridge parties and decided to get along without her third servant, a young girl whose unskilled labours might easily be undertaken by the other two. Harry Ellistone, a more imaginative economist, increased his béts on the flat-racing, entering Hope as a larger item on the credit side of his balancesheet. The Merrions, Paul and Cicely (née Ellistone), gave up their town fiat: Cicely remaining permanently with her two children in the country, which in any case she preferred, while Paul lived during the week in two furnished rooms in Hawthorne Square, W.2, which he very much disliked. George Ellistone, Charles's younger brother, who knew to a hair how terrible the enfant terrible of a well-to-do family can afford to be, announced that he had turnéd over a new leaf: and since it was feared that this might herald an attempt to borrow money, the announcement was received with somé concern. Charles, for his part, cancelled a proposed holidaycruise to Bermuda. He hated travelling. But he alsó worried a great deal, for he was a conscientious man ; and he became more than usually difiicult to live with. In addition to all this a number of nameless people, unrelated to the Ellistone family, found themselves unemployed. The heaviest burden feli, however, upon Mr. Horning, for whom Lassiter Street was not a euphony but the place where he spent one half of his waking life. For thirty-seven years Mr. Horning's feet had trod the pavement of that dingy, s.c.-a* 9