‘Please don’t bother about me,’ said Saxonstowe; ‘I quite understand.’ Lucian sighed--a sigh of relief. He looked round; Sprats had disappeared, but Hoskins, a staid and solemn butler, lingered at the door. Lucian appealed to him with the pathetic insistence of the man who wants very much to do something, and is not quite sure how to do it. ‘Oh, I say, Hoskins, I want--some food, you know, and wine, and----’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Hoskins. ‘Miss Chilverstone has just given me instructions, sir.’ ‘Oh, then we can go!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘I say, you really mustn’t mind--oh! I am forgetting that I must take some money,’ he said, and hurriedly left the room. His wife sighed and looked at Darlington. ‘I suppose we may now go to dinner,’ she said. ‘Lucian will sup on a sandwich somewhere about midnight.’ In the hall they found Sprats enveloped in an ulster which completely covered her dinner-gown; Lucian was cramming a handful of money, obviously taken at random from a receptacle where paper-currency and gold and silver coins were all mingled together, into a pocket; a footman was carrying a case of food and wine out to the cab. Mrs. Berenson insisted on seeing the two apostles of charity depart--the entire episode had put her into a good temper, and she enlivened the next hour with artless descriptions of her various states of feeling. Her chatter amused Saxonstowe; Darlington and Mrs. Damerel appeared to have heard much of it on previous occasions, and received it with equanimity. As soon as dinner was over she announced that if Lucian had been at home she had meant to spend the rest of the evening in expounding her ideas on the subject of the wished-for drama to him, but as things were she would go round to the Empire for an hour--she would just be in time, she said, to see a turn in which the performer, a contortionist, could tie himself into a complicated knot, dislocate every joint in his body, and assume the most grotesque positions, all without breaking himself in pieces. ‘It is the grimmest performance,’ she said to Saxonstowe; ‘it makes me dream, and I wake screaming; and the sensation of finding that the dream is a dream, and not a reality, is so exquisite that I treat myself to it at least once a week. I think that all great artists should cultivate sensations--don’t you?’ Upon this point Saxonstowe was unable to give a satisfactory answer, but he replied very politely that he trusted Mrs. Berenson would enjoy her treat. Soon after her departure he made his own adieu, leaving Mrs. Damerel to entertain Darlington and two or three other men who had dropped in after dinner, and who seemed in nowise surprised to find Lucian not at home. CHAPTER XIV