A dainty soup-plate was placed before each of us by the grinning maiden. Sylvia, if you please--Sylvia! It was "beef soup and vegetables" with a vengeance. It stood in a solid mass in each plate and there seemed to be everything in it but soup. It approached the spoon with glutinous reluctance and appeared to be begging to be cut with a knife and put quickly out of its misery. "Oh, I'm so sorry about the _crème d'asperges_," Letitia murmured, her lips parched, and a fever spot on each cheek, "I suppose that she didn't understand." "This is delicious, Mrs. Fairfax," said Arthur Tamworth nobly, "there is nothing I like better than good _consommé julienne_. I really prefer it to the other." We did not sip our soup, but we worked at it. It tasted like boiled everything, served up with the water. There were nasty little flecks of red and streaks of yellow in it. One expected anything, at each spoonful. Not if I had been starving, could I have eaten it. Arthur Tamworth plodded along laboriously, like a youth with his way to make in the world, and Letitia, as hostess, evidently felt bound by the rules of etiquette to do what she could. She had recovered her equanimity, wonderful little girl! "As we were saying before dinner," she remarked, trying not to look at the odious Sylvia, as she clattered away the plates, "the modern novel does seem to have deteriorated. If you consider all these irritating romances, so vastly inferior to the splendid imaginings of Dumas, you must admit the weakness, the effeminacy of such efforts to-day. It assuredly does seem as though all virility had departed from the modern band of so-called romance-weavers--" Letitia's effort at "polite conversation" suddenly ceased. The _homard naturel_ arrived and we could scarcely believe our eyes. Instead of the splendid crustacean that we had anticipated--the glowing macrurous delicacy that we had expected to see crouching in a juggle of water-cress--a hideous can, with a picture of a lobster on it, was placed before me. The can had been opened, and there, in poisonous looking obsequiousness, lurked our _homard naturel_. "This is absurd," I said, and my voice shook. Tamworth was an old friend, but sometimes old friends respond to insult, apparently deliberate. "I--I--can't understand," Letitia managed to say. "What--what is it?" "Simply a can of lobster," replied Arthur Tamworth, with a pleasant smile; "and very good it is, too, no doubt. Suppose you assist us, Fairfax, and cease looking as though you had lost all your available relatives, and your wife's as well."