hbourhood--carried us to
his villa, and presently we were seated in a brightly-lit dining-room.
It was not a pretty house, but it had the luxury of an expensive hotel,
and the supper we had was as good as any London restaurant. Gone were
the old days of fish and toast and boiled milk. Blenkiron squared his
shoulders and showed himself a noble trencherman.

'A year ago,' he told our host, 'I was the meanest kind of dyspeptic. I
had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the devil in my
stomach. Then I heard stories about the Robson Brothers, the star
surgeons way out west in White Springs, Nebraska. They were reckoned
the neatest hands in the world at carving up a man and removing
devilments from his intestines. Now, sir, I've always fought pretty shy
of surgeons, for I considered that our Maker never intended His
handiwork to be reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by that
time I was feeling so almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to
put a bullet through my head. "There's no other way," I said to myself.
"Either you forget your religion and your miserable cowardice and get
cut up, or it's you for the Golden Shore." So I set my teeth and
journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my duodenum.
They saw that the darned thing wouldn't do, so they sidetracked it and
made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic. It was the cunningest
piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of the side of our First
Parent. They've got a mighty fine way of charging, too, for they take
five per cent of a man's income, and it's all one to them whether he's
a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week. I can tell you I took
some trouble to be a very rich man last year.'

All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor. I was trying to
assimilate the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his
heavenly drawl, and I was puzzling my head about Ivery. I had a
ridiculous notion that I had seen him before, but, delve as I might
into my memory, I couldn't place him. He was the incarnation of the
commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who patronized
pacificism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip his hands too
far. He was always damping down Blenkiron's volcanic utterances. 'Of
course, as you know, the other side have an argument which I find
rather hard to meet ...' 'I can sympathize with patriotism, and even
with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always come back to