Read it through once

He gripped my hand hard, and braced up, and was all right and lively after that for the dinner—which didn’t come off. No; the usual thing happened, the thing that is always happening under that vicious and aggravating English system—the matter of precedence couldn’t be settled, and so there was no dinner. Englishmen always eat dinner before they go out to dinner, because _they_ know the risks they are running; but nobody ever warns the stranger, and so he walks placidly into the trap. Of course nobody was hurt this time, because we had all been to dinner, none of us being novices except Hastings, and he having been informed by the minister at the time that he invited him that in deference to the English custom he had not provided any dinner. Everybody took a lady and processioned down to the dining-room, because it is usual to go through the motions; but there the dispute began. The Duke of Shoreditch wanted to take precedence, and sit at the head of the table, holding that he outranked a minister who represented merely a nation and not a monarch; but I stood for my rights, and refused to yield. In the gossip column I ranked all dukes not royal, and said so, and claimed precedence of this one. It couldn’t be settled, of course, struggle as we might and did, he finally (and injudiciously) trying to play birth and antiquity, and I ‘seeing’ his Conqueror and ‘raising’ him with Adam, whose direct posterity I was, as shown by my name, while _he_ was of a collateral branch, as shown by _his_, and by his recent Norman origin; so we all processioned back to the drawing-room again and had a perpendicular lunch—plate of sardines and a strawberry, and you group yourself and stand up and eat it. Here the religion of precedence is not so strenuous; the two persons of highest rank chuck up a shilling, the one that wins has first go at his strawberry, and the loser gets the shilling. The next two chuck up, then the next two, and so on. After refreshment, tables were brought, and we all played cribbage, sixpence a game. The English never play any game for amusement. If they can’t make something or lose something—they don’t care which—they won’t play.