All round the table were little paper crabs made by Edward in perspiring haste that afternoon, inscribed on their backs with the names of the guests, and brought down in a suitcase an hour before. Nobody noticed them. Everyone sat down without consulting the crabs. Edward cursed the crabs because they looked forlornly jocose and were not noticed. There were several kind persons in the room who began to try and sit beside Edward when they noticed him making his way to the isolated head of the table. A thin yellow man with hair cut to resemble a wig began describing to Edward a new mousetrap now on sale in the Oakland hardware stores. Edward leaned forward and smiled numbly and thought that perhaps he was looking like a real host. Trays full of cocktails came in, borne by eager dirty shirtsleeved waiters. Emily came in behind the cocktails. Edward pretended not to see her for a moment, having a vague idea that this would make him more valuable to Emily. Emily took off her hat with boy-like indifference and, before hanging it on a peg, waved it intimately at Edward. “Great Scott, look at these too darling crabs. Look, they’re supposed to show us where to sit. Oh dear, we’ve all sat down wrong. My crab says I’m supposed to be Mr. Herbert B. Undressed. No, as you were. It’s Herbert B. Weinhard.” A guest called Bossy was explaining to Edward across the bosoms of two intervening ladies his misgivings about the future of the canning trade. “Never mind,” continued Emily in a voice as clear as a flute. “I’m going to make my crab look as if it was called Herbert Undressed.” She was drawing faces on Edward’s crabs. They were no longer Edward’s crabs. His cute notion was simply being made cuter by Emily. “Make my crab look like me, Emily.” “No, do mine first....” “Make Edward’s look like Edward....” There was a great deal of giggling. The air round Emily was full of crumpled crabs. There was one in her hair. Everyone was talking now, but Edward was still entangled in the future of the canning trade. His only remark in the next fifteen minutes was, “Well, personally I never met a canner....” He realised at last that Bossy and he were haunted by the same fear—the fear of being left out. The canning trade was a bond between them. “At least we look as if we were talking,” thought Edward. Bossy was a university instructor with fair childlike hair contradicting the severity of horn-rimmed spectacles and a little imperial. To share a danger with him aroused in Edward no enthusiasm. “My Lord!” he heard Melsie Ponting say. “I’m just sick of sitting next to Lon. I’ll tell the world he’s no gentleman. He’s just said something that I couldn’t possibly repeat in mixed company. Would anybody like me to?” Emily shouted, “All right then, General Post!” Having arrived late she was sitting between two elderly women.