Rituals

     ... Angus turned to her suddenly and said, "Domenica, why are we doing this? Why are we having all these people round to dinner?"

      It might have been another occasion on which Mallory's reply would have been called for: because they're there, but she said instead: "Friendship."

      He had not expected that answer. "Just that?"

     "Yes. Because a dinner party provides the ideal opportunity to sit with people. To talk to them."

      "You don't think, then, that it's simply a bourgeois ritual?"

      Domenica smiled. "I might have thought that in the past," she said. "No more, though. I now realise, I think, how important these bourgeois rituals are. Or all rituals, for that matter, bourgeois or not."