Excerpt from The Human Cobweb: A Romance of Old Peking
"La derniere chose qu"on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu"il faut mettre la premiere." - Pascal.
It was almost exactly eight o"clock when the first guests reached Mrs. John West"s hospitable house, and it was almost exactly a quarter past before the last person had arrived. It was significant, in Mrs. John West"s eyes, that the first comers should have been Phyllis May and her mother, and that the very last man of all had been no other than Peter Kerr. Somehow, it at once attracted her attention. The significance, it is true, was of that special kind which means infinitely more to a woman than to a man; for Peter Kerr"s lateness might have really been occasioned by a hundred different things having not the slightest connection with this particular dinner-party. Certainly, if his apologies meant anything, it was only his watch which had been at fault, which is another way of saying that he had been forgetful or careless.
But Mrs. John West was one of those women who cling to preconceived ideas, and who pay scant attention to masculine explanations. Also she had arrived at that puzzling age when one ponders over things and gives undue importance to the deductive method.
It was therefore a source of further satisfaction for her to be able to note that Peter Kerr deliberately delayed going up to Phyllis May until further delay had become impossible. Even when that last unfortunate moment had come, he made his greetings with his habitually easy manner curiously restrained and overcast by something difficult to explain.
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