The Matador of the Five Towns

Excerpt from The Matador of the Five Towns: And Other Stories

Mrs Brindley looked across the lunch-table at her husband with glinting, eager eyes, which showed that there was something unusual in the brain behind them.

"Bob," she said, factitiously calm, "You don't know what I've just remembered "

"Well?" said he.

"It's only grandma's birthday to-day "

My friend Robert Brindley, the architect, struck the table with a violent fist, making his little boys blink, and then he said quietly:

"The deuce "

I gathered that grandmamma's birthday had been forgotten and that it was not a festival that could be neglected with impurity. Both Mr and Mrs Brindley had evidently a humorous appreciation of crises, contretemps, and those collisions of circumstances which are usually called "junctures" for short. I could have imagined either of them saying to the other" " Here's a funny thing The house is on fire " And then yielding to laughed now; she gazed at the table-cloth and laughed now; she gazed at the table-cloth an laughed almost silently to herself; though it appeared that their joint forgetfulness might result in temporary estrangement from a venerable ancestor who was also, birthdays being duly observed, a continual fount of rich presents in specie.

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