or yourself--well,
it isn't playing the game."

"Auguthuth," was the curt comment of his partner, "you're a fool."

"All right, my boy, you try," suggested Augustus.

"Jutht what I mean to do," asserted his partner.

"Well," demanded Augustus one evening later, meeting Isidore ascending
the stairs after a long talk with the stranger in the dining-room with
the door shut.

"Oh, don't arth me," retorted Isidore, "thilly ath, thath what he ith."

"What did he say?"

"What did he thay! talked about the Jewth: what a grand rathe they
were--how people mithjudged them: all that thort of rot.

"Thaid thome of the motht honorable men he had ever met had been Jewth.
Thought I wath one of 'em!"

"Well, did you get anything out of him?"

"Get anything out of him. Of courthe not. Couldn't very well thell the
whole rathe, ath it were, for a couple of hundred poundth, after that.
Didn't theem worth it."

There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually
to the conclusion were not worth the doing:--Snatching at the gravy;
pouncing out of one's turn upon the vegetables and helping oneself to
more than one's fair share; manoeuvering for the easy-chair; sitting on
the evening paper while pretending not to have seen it--all such-like
tiresome bits of business. For the little one made out of it, really
it was not worth the bother. Grumbling everlastingly at one's food;
grumbling everlastingly at most things; abusing Pennycherry behind her
back; abusing, for a change, one's fellow-boarders; squabbling with
one's fellow-boarders about nothing in particular; sneering at one's
fellow-boarders; talking scandal of one's fellow-boarders; making
senseless jokes about one's fellow-boarders; talking big about oneself,
nobody believing one--all such-like vulgarities. Other boarding-houses
might indulge in them: Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square had its dignity to
consider.

The truth is, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming to a very good
opinion of itself: for the which not Bloomsbury Square so much as
the stranger must be blamed. The stranger had arrived at Forty-eight
Bloomsbury Square with the preconceived idea--where obtained from
Heaven knows--that its seemingly commonplace, mean-minded, coarse-fibred
occupants were in reality ladies and gentlemen of the first water; and
time and observation had apparently only strengthened this absurd idea.
The natural result was, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming round