sort
ill together.

[Illustration: HE TURNED TO ME WITH AN INANE SMILE.]

As my neighbour sat down, he turned to me with an inane smile which
occupied all his face. 'Good evening,' he said, in a baronial drawl.
'Miss Cayley, I gathah? I asked the skippah's leave to set next yah. We
ought to be friends--rathah. I think yah know my poor deah old aunt,
Lady Georgina Fawley.'

I bowed a somewhat, freezing bow. 'Lady Georgina is one of my dearest
friends,' I answered.

'No, really? Poor deah old Georgey! Got somebody to stick up for her at
last, has she? Now that's what I call chivalrous of yah. Magnanimous,
isn't it? I like to see people stick up for their friends. And it must
be a novelty for Georgey. For between you and me, a moah cantankerous
spiteful acidulated old cough-drop than the poor deah soul it 'ud be
difficult to hit upon.'

'Lady Georgina has brains,' I answered; 'and they enable her to
recognise a fool when she sees him. I will admit that she does not
suffer fools gladly.'

He turned to me with a sudden sharp look in the depths of the
lack-lustre eyes. Already it began to strike me that, though the
pea-green young man was inane, he had his due proportion of a certain
insidious practical cunning. 'That's true,' he answered, measuring me.
'And according to her, almost everybody's a fool--especially her
relations. There's a fine knack of sweeping generalisation about deah
skinny old Georgey. The few people she reahlly likes are all archangels;
the rest are blithering idiots; there's no middle course with her.'

I held my peace frigidly.

'She thinks me a very special and peculiah fool,' he went on, crumbling
his bread.

'Lady Georgina,' I answered, 'is a person of exceptional discrimination.
I would almost always accept her judgment on anyone as practically
final.'

He laid down his soup-spoon, fondled the imperceptible moustache with
his tapering fingers, and then broke once more into a cheerful expanse
of smile which reminded me of nothing so much as of the village idiot.
It spread over his face as the splash from a stone spreads over a
mill-pond. 'Now that's a nice cheerful sort of thing to say to a
fellah,' he ejaculated, fixing his eye-glass in his eye, with a few
fierce contortions of his facial muscles. 'That's encouraging, don't yah
know, as the foundation of an acquaintance. Makes a good cornah-stone.
Calculated to place things at once upon what yah call a friendly basis.
Georgey said you