He did so, and took the disastrous consequences. For the Tophams came, and, with the eyes of the whole "Cambrian" upon them, behaved for all the world as if they had been dining at their own inferior Liberty Hall of a "Montgomery." So at least it seemed to Philip, and bad enough surely that would have been; but Mrs. Lacey made it far, far worse. It was plain as plain could be (she said afterwards) that the Tophams' sprawls and freedoms were all put on, and that they had been like four fishes out of water every minute of the time--he ought to be ashamed of himself, showing them up before everybody's eyes like that!... "Come as you are," Philip Lacey had said, with the truest delicacy, since it was very unlikely that the Tophams had brought evening clothes to their Camps and Pow-Wows; and so nobody dressed. The "Cambrian's" tables were no longer arranged in the form of a T. With the installation of gas, numerous smaller tables, with a couple of large oval ones among them, had taken its place, and at one of the oval tables the four Laceys and the four Tophams sat. Mr. Lacey was at one end, with Mrs. Topham on his right, Mrs. Lacey was at the other end with Mr. Topham on her right. At the sides sat the younger ones, a Topham and a Lacey on either side. This was not the happiest of arrangements, since young ladies who have just "finished" in Paris usually think they have seen enough of school-teachers for some time to come, but it was the best that could be managed. Nor could Miss June kick Miss Wy under the table. The discord showed from the very first moment. The Laceys, as urbane hosts, would have kept to such light and frothy conversational matters as how the Tophams liked Llanyglo, whether they had been up into the mountains yet, and similar subjects; but not so the Tophams. Briefly, they went for the eternal verities like four steam-navvies. Before she had unfolded her napkin, Mrs. Topham had Philip Lacey helpless in the toils of More's _Utopia_, and by the time she had asked him half a dozen searching questions, looking mistrustfully at him as much as to say, "You _dare_ to lie to me, sir!" the unhappy man had to confess that it was some time since he had read the book, and that his textual memory was by no means as good as it had been. A second attack rendered him abject. The third was not delivered. Seeing him such a rank and pitiable outsider, Mrs. Topham contemptuously spared him. "And _this_ is the state of education to-day!" she said scornfully to her husband afterwards....