he was drunk, if I hadn't known that he hadn't touched any liquor whatever. But a man of Peter's temperament pays for this sort of thing—it isn't the sort of way he's meant to take life.
“Whatever the reason may have been I know that I felt suddenly outside the whole business and most awfully depressed. I think Miss Monogue felt exactly the same. By the time the wine was on the table all I wanted was to get right away. It was almost as though I had been looking on at something that I was ashamed to see. There was a kind of deliberate determination about their happiness and Clare's little body with her hair on the verge, as it seemed, of a positive downfall, had something quite pitiful in its deliberate rejoicing; such a child, my dear—I never realised how young until last night. Such a child and needing some one so much older and wiser than Peter to manage it all.
“Well, there I was hating it when the final moment came. Cards got up and in one of the wittiest little speeches you ever heard in your life, proposed Peter's health, alluded to ‘Reuben Hallard,’ then Clare, then the Son and Heir, a kind of back fling at old Dawson's, and then last of all, an apostrophe to ‘The Stone House’ all glory and honour, &c.:—well, it was most neatly done and we all sat back, silent, for Peter's reply.
“The dear boy stood there, all flushed and excited, with his hair pushed back off his forehead and began the most extraordinary speech I've ever heard. I can't possibly give you the effect of it at secondhand, in the mere repetition of it there was little more than that he was wildly, madly happy, that there was no one in the world as happy as he, that now at last the gods had given him all that he had ever wanted, let them now do their worst—and so crying, flung his glass over his shoulder, and smashed it on to the wall behind him.
“I cannot possibly tell you how sinister, how ominous the whole thing suddenly was. It swooped down upon all of us like a black cloud. Credit me, if you will, with a highly-strung bundle of nerves (not so solid matter-of-fact as I seem, you know well enough) but it seemed to me, at that moment that Peter was defying, consciously, with his
