le
urging was required to induce them to sit, and, when seated they were,
Loftus was next to Fanny.

"What are you doing uptown at this hour?" Annandale asked Orr, who had
got between Loftus and Sylvia. "I thought you lawyers were all so
infernally busy."

"Everybody ought to be," Orr replied. "Although an anarchist who had
managed to get himself locked up, and whom I succeeded in getting out,
confided to me that only imbeciles work. By way of exchange I had to
confide to him that it is only imbeciles that do not."

"Now that," said Annandale, who had never done a stroke of work in his
life, "is what I call a very dangerous theory."

"A theory that is not dangerous," Orr retorted, "can hardly be called
a theory at all."

With superior tact Sylvia intervened. "But what is anarchy,
Melanchthon? Socialism I know about, but anarchy--?"

"To put it vulgarly, I drink and you pay."

"But suppose I am an anarchist?"

"Then Sherry pays."

"But supposing he is an anarchist?"

"Then there is a row. And there will be one. The country is drifting
that way. It will, I think, be bloody, but I think, too, it will be
brief. Anarchists, you know, maintain that of all prejudices capital
and matrimony are the stupidest. What they demand is the free
circulation of money and women. As a nation, we are great at
entertaining, but we will never entertain that."

"Why, then, did you not let the beggar rot where he was?" Annandale
swiftly and severely inquired.

"Oh, you know, if I had not got him out someone else would have, and I
thought it better that the circulation of money should proceed
directly from his pocket to mine."

"You haven't any stupid prejudices yourself, that's clear," said
Annandale, helping himself as he spoke to more Scotch. "Sylvia," he
continued, "if I am ever up for murder I will retain Melanchthon Orr."

Orr laughed. "That retainer will never reach me. You would not hurt a
fly."

"Wouldn't I?" And Annandale assumed an expression of great ferocity.
"You don't know me. I can imagine circumstances in which I could wade
in gore. By the way, I have ordered a revolver."

"What!"

"Yes, a burglar got in my place the night before last and woke me up.
If he comes back and wakes me up again I'll blow his head off."

Sylvia looked at him much as she might at a boastful child. "Yes, yes,
Arthur, but please don't take so much of that whisky."

"I think I will have a drop of it, if I may," said Loftus, who
m