crises nearly always collapses too soon,
and the sentry catches you on your return journey.

For the lady visitor the problem is comparatively simple. I should
mention that it is a perfectly legitimate manoeuvre to get your bath
put down to somebody else if you can do it; and the crack lady-player
usually wraps herself in an unobtrusive bath-wrap, shrouds her head,
modestly conceals her face, slips into a friend's room to borrow some
Creme-Limon and, after an interval, rushes noisily out of the friend's
room to her bath, which, with any luck, is charged to her friend's
account.

The beginner at the game contents himself with less complicated ruses.
Sometimes he has his bath late at night, when the sentries have been
taken off; but, as the lights go out _en masse_ at eleven, even this
operation has to be carefully timed. There is nothing much gloomier
than a bath by candle-light, except perhaps a bath in the dark.
Hundreds, however, of both sorts are endured in this hotel.

The more brazen or the more timid simply walk into the bathroom fully
dressed during the day, carrying a number of dirty golf-balls in their
hands, and towels in their pockets and sponges up their sleeves, and
issue later fully dressed with clean white golf-balls in their
hands. It is generally thought, however, that this device is _just_ a
little--I mean it's not exactly--_you_ know what I mean.

The Korban Bath Rules will probably remain unwritten for many a
day, but I earnestly hope that before next summer the traditions and
etiquette of bath-warfare as between individual hotel-visitors will
be codified and issued in an intelligible form. At the moment the
most extraordinary confusion prevails, and no one can tell whether
any particular stratagem will be hailed with applause as a bold and
legitimate operation of war or universally condemned as a barefaced
piece of bath-hoggery. Recently, for example, an extremely courteous,
not to say gallant, old gentleman was severely lectured by a lady for
digging himself in on the mat and maintaining his position there till
she emerged. She stated with, I think, considerable force that she had
passed the age when a lady likes to be seen coming out of a bathroom
with disordered locks; she also said that he was ruining her chance of
a Korban bath by drawing attention to the fact that there was somebody
inside.

He replied with equal force that, whenever he considerately withdrew
from the mat in order to let