ndard of decency is demanded from the inmates. Ask anyone at
the Drones, and they will tell you that it was a black day for the dear
old club when this chap Glossop somehow wriggled into the list of
members. Here you will find a man who dislikes his face; there one who
could stand his face if it wasn't for his habits. But the universal
consensus of opinion is that the fellow is a bounder and a tick, and that
the moment he showed signs of wanting to get into the place he should
have been met with a firm _nolle prosequi_ and heartily blackballed."

I had to pause again here, partly in order to take in a spot of breath,
and partly to wrestle with the almost physical torture of saying these
frightful things about poor old Tuppy.

"There are some chaps," I resumed, forcing myself once more to the
nauseous task, "who, in spite of looking as if they had slept in their
clothes, can get by quite nicely because they are amiable and suave.
There are others who, for all that they excite adverse comment by being
fat and uncouth, find themselves on the credit side of the ledger owing
to their wit and sparkling humour. But this Glossop, I regret to say,
falls into neither class. In addition to looking like one of those things
that come out of hollow trees, he is universally admitted to be a dumb
brick of the first water. No soul. No conversation. In short, any girl
who, having been rash enough to get engaged to him, has managed at the
eleventh hour to slide out is justly entitled to consider herself dashed
lucky."

I paused once more, and cocked an eye at Angela to see how the treatment
was taking. All the while I had been speaking, she had sat gazing
silently into the bushes, but it seemed to me incredible that she should
not now turn on me like a tigress, according to specifications. It beat
me why she hadn't done it already. It seemed to me that a mere tithe of
what I had said, if said to a tigress about a tiger of which she was
fond, would have made her--the tigress, I mean--hit the ceiling.

And the next moment you could have knocked me down with a toothpick.

"Yes," she said, nodding thoughtfully, "you're quite right."

"Eh?"

"That's exactly what I've been thinking myself."

"What!"

"'Dumb brick.' It just describes him. One of the six silliest asses in
England, I should think he must be."

I did not speak. I was endeavouring to adjust the faculties, which were
in urgent need of a bit of first-aid treatment.

I mea