No Fusion Between These Souls

    If Muriel had hoped that a mutual esteem would spring up between her father and her betrothed during this week-end visit, she was doomed to disappointment. The thing was a failure from the start. Sacheverell’s host did him extremely well, giving him the star guest room, the Blue Suite, and bringing out the oldest port for his benefit, but it was plain that he thought little of the young man. The colonel’s subjects were sheep (in sickness and in health), manure, wheat, mangold-wurzels, huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’; while Sacheverell was at his best on Proust, the Russian Ballet, Japanese prints, and the influence of James Joyce on the younger Bloomsbury novelists. There was no fusion between these men’s souls. Colonel Branksome did not actually bite Sacheverell in the leg, but when you had said that you had said everything.
Muriel was deeply concerned.
    “I’ll tell you what it is, Dogface,” she said, as she was seeing her loved one to his train on the Monday, “we’ve got off on the wrong foot. The male parent may have loved you at sight, but, if he did, he took another look and changed his mind.”
    “I fear we were not exactly en rapport,” sighed Sacheverell. “Apart from the fact that the mere look of him gave me a strange, sinking feeling, my conversation seemed to bore him.”
    “You didn’t talk about the right things.”
    “I couldn’t. I know so little of mangold-wurzels. Manure is a sealed book to me.”