There were other "colleagues" whose attendance he
would have liked to compel; but one of them, deep in the
country, was devoting his weekends to his new French
motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon Neglected
Periods of Mahommedan History, and both were at the
breaking strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the
deputation to dinner. Lord Selkirk, who took them to
Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them to one of
those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he
was so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard
about, upon which royalty was present in two generations.
They travelled to it by special train, a circumstance
which made them grave, receptive, and even slightly
ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty
on his hands, naturally could not give them much of his
time, and they moved about in a cluster, avoiding the
ladies' trains and advising one another that it was a
good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large
private means; it wasn't everybody that could afford to
take the job. Yet they were not wholly detached from the
occasion; they looked at it, after they had taken it in,
with an air half-amused, half-proprietary. All this had,
in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs.
One of them--Bates it was--responding to a lady who was
effusive about the strawberries, even took the modestly
depreciatory attitude of the host.
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