When an ant got through it was exposed to a fire of bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel, and rewarded those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue.

Playing this game they lost their stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for Mr.
Perrott, who was very shy, said, "Permit me," and removed an ant from Evelyn's neck.
"It would be no laughing matter really," said Mrs.Elliot confidentially to Mrs.Thornbury, "if an ant did get between the vest and the skin." The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had every reason to think his party a success.

Nevertheless he became, for no reason at all, profoundly depressed.
"They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble," he thought, surveying his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the plates.

He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth.

Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another! There was Mrs.Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs.
Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan--she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less one examined into Evelyn's character the better, he suspected.