with you; I am not
a money-lender."

"_Pack dich zum Henker_!" growled Peter, with a comical grimace. "_Was
fuer_ a casuist! What a swindler you'd make! I wonder you have the face
to deny the debt. Well, and how did you leave Frau Sauer-Kraut?" he
said, deeming it prudent to sheer off the subject.

"Fat as a Christmas turkey."

"Of a German sausage. The extraordinary things that woman stuffed
herself with. Chunks of fat, stewed apples, Kartoffel salad--all mixed
up in one plate, as in a dustbin."

"Don't! You make my gorge rise. _Ach Himmel_! to think that this nation
should be musical! O Music, heavenly maid, how much garlic I have
endured for thy sake!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Peter, putting down his whisky that he might throw
himself freely back in the easy-chair and roar.

"Oh that garlic!" he said, panting. "No wonder they smoked so much in
Leipsic. Even so they couldn't keep the reek out of the staircases.
Still, it's a great country is Germany. Our house does a tremendous
business in German patents."

"A great country? A land of barbarians rather. How can a people be
civilised that eats jam with its meat?"

"Bravo, Lancelot! You're in lovely form to-night. You seem to go a
hundred miles out of your way to come the truly British. First it was
oil--now it's jam. There was that aristocratic flash in your eye, too,
that look of supreme disdain which brings on riots in Trafalgar Square.
Behind the patriotic, the national note: 'How can a people be civilised
that eats jam with its meat?' I heard the deeper, the oligarchic accent:
'How can a people be enfranchised that eats meat with its fingers?' Ah,
you are right! How you do hate the poor! What bores they are! You
aristocrats--the products of centuries of culture, comfort, and
cocksureness--will never rid yourselves of your conviction that you are
the backbone of England--no, not though that backbone were picked clean
of every scrap of flesh by the rats of Radicalism."

"What in the devil are you talking about now?" demanded Lancelot. "You
seem to me to go a hundred miles out of _your_ way to twit me with my
poverty and my breeding. One would almost think you were anxious to
convince me of the poverty of _your_ breeding."

"Oh, a thousand pardons!" ejaculated Peter, blushing violently. "But,
good heavens, old chap! There's your hot temper again. You surely
wouldn't suspect _me_, of all people in the world, of meaning anything
p