Surely you will wake up
presently, Bagshot, and wonder what you have been about.

"Half-past four, by Jove! I must be getting on. Well, Bagshot, ta-ta.
One must talk, you know. I really hope you will be comfortable in your
new rooms."

And so good-bye to Bagshot, staring in a puzzled way at his reviled and
desecrated walls.

ON SOCIAL MUSIC

My poor uncle came to me the other evening in a most distressful state,
broken down to common blasphemy. His ample front was rumpled with
sorrow and his tie disorderly aslant. His hair had gone rough with his
troubles. "The time I have had, George!" he panted. "Give me
something to drink in the name of Holy Charity."

Since the _Pall Mall Gazette_ took to reporting his little sayings
about photographs and ornaments, ideals and fashions, he has been
setting up as a conversationalist. He thinks he was designed by
Providence to that end, and aids his destiny as much as he can by
elaborately preparing remarks.

Yet this thing had happened. "They put," said my uncle, "a little chap
at the piano, and me at a very nice girl indeed as she looked; and the
little chap began, and so did I. I said a prelude thing of mine, brand
new and rather pretty."

He stopped. He turned to nerve himself with whisky.

"Well," I said, when the pause seemed sufficient; "what did she say?"

My uncle looked unspeakable things. Then in a whisper, bending towards
me:

"_She said----Sssh_!"

He repeated it that I might grasp its full enormity, "_Sssh_!--so!"

"What _is_ music," said my uncle, after a moody silence, "that
reasonable people should listen to it? I _had_ to listen to it myself,
and it struck me. It was just a tune this little chap was trying to
remember, and now he would come at it this way and now that. He never
got it quite right, though he fumbled about it for ten minutes or a
quarter of an hour. And then two girls went, and one punished the
piano while the other, with a wrist rather than an ear for music,
drowned its cries with a violin. So it went on all the evening, and
when I moved they all looked at me; I had been put on a nervous wicker
chair, and I knew my shoes squeaked like a carnival of swine, and so I
could not get away. And all the things that kept coming into my head,
George, the neat remarks and graceful sayings!

"You see, I look at it in this light. Music is merely background, and
ought to be kept in its place. I am no enemy of music, Georg