The garden lay dozing in the summer sun, a sun, too, that was really hot
and luminous, worthy of mid-June, and Philip Home had paid his
acknowledgments to its power by twice moving his chair into the shifting
shade of the house, which stood with blinds drawn down, as if blinking
in the brightness. Somewhere on the lawn below him, but hidden by the
flower-beds of the terraced walk, a mowing-machine was making its
clicking journeys to and fro, and the sound of it seemed to him to be
extraordinarily consonant to the still heat of the afternoon. Entirely
in character also with the day was the light hot wind that stirred
fitfully among the garden beds as if it had gone to sleep there, and now
and then turned over and made the flowers rustle and sigh. Huge Oriental
poppies drooped their scarlet heads, late wall-flowers still sent forth
their hot, homely odour, peonies blazed and flaunted, purple irises
rivalled in their fading glories the budding stars of clematis that
swarmed up the stone vases on the terrace, golden rain showered from the
laburnums, lilacs stood thick in fragrant clumps and clusters.
Canterbury bells raised spires of dry, crinkly blue, and
forget-me-nots--nearly over--made a dim blue border to the glorious
carpet of the beds. For the warm weather this year had come late but
determinedly, spring flowers still lingered, and the later blossoms of
early summer had been forced into premature appearance. This fact
occupied Philip at this moment quite enormously. What would the garden
be like in July? There must come a break somewhere, when the precious
summer flowers were over, and before the autumn ones began.
It was not unreasonable of him to be proud of his garden, for any
garden-lover would here have recognised a master-hand. Below, in the
thick clay that bordered the Thames, were the roses kept apart, with no
weed, no other flower to pilfer their rightful monopoly of "richness." A
flight of twelve stone steps led up from this garden to the tennis lawn,
a sheet of velvet turf, unbordered by any flowers to be trampled by
ball-seekers, or to be respected by ball-losers. Above again where he
sat now a deep herbaceous border ran round three sides of the gravelled
space, in the middle of which a bronze fountain cast water over Nereids
and aquatic plants, and behind him rose the dozing house, sun-blinds and
rambler rose, jasmine and red bricks.
Certainly at this moment Philip was more than content with life, a very
rare but a very enviable condition of affairs. The lines seemed to him
to be laid not in pleasant but in ecstatic places, and youth, hard work,
a well-earned holiday, keen sensibilities, and being in love combined to
form a state of mind which might be envied by the happiest man God ever
made. An hour's meditation with a shut book which he had selected at
random from the volumes on the drawing-room table had convinced him of
this, and the interruption that now came to his solitary thoughts was as
delightful in its own way as the thoughts themselves.
Mrs. Home did everything in the way most characteristic of her, and if a
Dresden shepherdess could be conceived as sixty years old she might
possibly rival the clean, precise delicacy of Philip's mother. She
dressed in grey and Quakerish colours, but of an exquisite neatness, and
her clothes smelled faintly but fragrantly of lavender and old-fashioned
herbs. Even at sixty the china-prettiness of her face gave her
pre-eminent charm; and her cheeks, wrinkled with no sharp lines of
sudden shock, but with the long pleasant passage of time, were as pink
and soft as a girl's. Her hair was perfectly white, but still abundant,
and, taken up in rather old-fashioned lines above her temples gave a
roundness and youth to her face which was entirely in keeping with her.
As she stepped out of the drawing-room window she put up her parasol,
and walked quietly over the gravel to where her dark, long-limbed son
was sitting.
"Darling, would it not be wise of you to go for a row on the river?"
she said. "Your holiday is so short. I want you to make the best of it."
Philip turned in his chair.
"Darling, it would be most unwise," he said. "The best holiday is to do
nothing at all. People are so stupid! They think that if your brain, or
what does duty for it, is tired, the remedy is to tire your body also."
"But a little walk, perhaps, Philip," said she. "I can explain to your
guests when they come. Do you know, I am rather frightened of them. That
extraordinary Mr. Merivale, for instance. Will he want to take off all
his clothes, and eat cabbages?"
Philip's grave face slowly relaxed into a smile. He hardly ever laughed,
but his smile was very complete.
"I shall tell him you said that," he remarked.
Mrs. Home sat down with quite a thump at the horror of the thought.
"Dear Philip," she said, "you mustn't--you really mustn't."
He stretched out his hand to her.
"Oh, mother," he said, "what will cure you of being so indiscreet except
threats, and putting those threats into execution if necessary? He will
want to take off all his clothes, as we all shall, if it goes on being
so hot. Only he won't any more than we shall. He will probably be
extremely well-dressed. No, the Hermit is only the Hermit at the
Hermitage. Even there he doesn't take off all his clothes, though he
lives an outdoor life. You never quite have recognised what a remarkable
person he is."
"I should remark him anywhere," said Mrs. Home in self-defence. "And
what age is he, Philip? Is he twenty, or thirty, or what?"
Philip considered.
"He must be a year or two older than me," he said. "Yes, I should say he
was thirty-one. But it's quite true--he doesn't look any age; he looks
ageless. Entirely the result of no clothes and cabbages."
"They always seem to me so tasteless," remarked Mrs. Home. "But they
seem to suit him."
"Dear old Hermit!" said Philip. "I haven't seen him for a whole year. It
becomes harder and harder to get him away from his beloved forest."
"I can never understand what he does with himself, year in, year out,
down there," said Mrs. Home.
"He thinks," said Philip.
"I should call that doing nothing," remarked his mother.
"I know; there is that view of it. At the same time, it must be
extremely difficult to think all day. I have been thinking for an hour,
and I have quite finished. I should have had to begin to read if you
hadn't come out. And whom else are you frightened of out of all these
terrible people?"
Mrs. Home smoothed her grey gown a little nervously.
"I am frightened of Lady Ellington," she said. "She has so very much--so
very much self-possession. She is so practical, too: she always tells me
all sorts of ways of managing the house, and suggests all kinds of
improvements. It is very kind of her, and she is always quite right. And
I think I am a little afraid of Madge."
"Ah, I can't permit that," said Philip, smiling again.
This brought their talk at once into more intimate lands.
"Ah, dear Philip," she said. "I pray God that it may go well with you!"
Philip sat upright in his chair, and the book fell unheeded to the
ground.
"How did you guess?" he said. "I suspect you of being a witch, mother;
and if we had lived a few hundred years ago, instead of now, it would
have been my painful duty to have had you burned. It would have hurt you
far more than me, because the sense of duty would have sustained me. I
never said a word to you about Madge, yet you knew I was in love with
her, I think, almost before I knew it myself."
"Yes, dear. I am sure I did," said Mrs. Home with gentle complacence.
"Well, you dear witch, tell me how you knew."
"Oh, Philip, it was easy to see. You never looked at any girl before
like that. I used to be afraid you would never marry. You used to say
dreadful things, you know, that really frightened me. Even since you
were quite a little boy, you thought women were a bother. You used to
say they couldn't play games, and were always in the way, and had
headaches, and were without any sense of honour."
"All quite true in the main," said the misogynous Philip.
Mrs. Home held up her hands in protest.
"Dear, when have you known me have a headache, or do anything
dishonourable?" she asked pertinently.
"I always excepted you. And I except Madge. She beat me at croquet the
other day, and in the middle of the game volunteered the information
that she had not moved the ball she croquetted."
"She always would," said his mother gently. "Oh, Philip, good luck to
your wooing, my dear!"
There was a long pause; a sparrow in a prodigious bustle alighted on the
edge of the fountain, and drank as if it had been a traveller straight
from Sahara; the wind woke again in the flower-beds and gave a long,
fragrant sigh; the sun-blinds of the drawing-room stirred as it wandered
by them, and the pale purple petals of a grape-bunch cluster of wisteria
fell on the crimson-striped canvas. The exquisiteness of this midsummer
moment struck Philip with a sudden pang of delight, none the less keen
because the love with which his soul was full was not yet certain or
complete: the pause before completion was his.
"Thank you, mother," he said at last. "I shall know very soon, I shall
ask her while she is here."
He got up as he spoke.
"I can't sit still any more," he said. "Speaking of it has made me
restless. I must go and do something violent. Perhaps I will take your
advice and go for a row. They will not be here till nearly seven. Oh,
by-the-way, Evelyn Dundas is coming, too. You will have someone to flirt
with, mother."
"Dear, you say such dreadful things!" said Mrs. Home. "And if you say
them while Lady Ellington is here, I shall feel so awkward."
"Well, Evelyn proposed to elope with you last time he was here," said
Philip. "I think I shall commission him to paint your portrait."
"Who wants the picture of an old woman like me?" said Mrs. Home. "But
get him to do Madge's."
Philip considered this.
"That's an idea," he said. "He could paint her divinely. Really,
mother--if ah! a big 'if.' Do you know, I'm rather uneasy about Evelyn."
"Why? I thought he was getting on so well."
"He is as far as painting goes. They think very highly of him. But the
moment he gets a couple of hundred pounds he buys a motor-car or
something, and next week his watch is in pawn. Now, when you are
twenty-five, it is time to stop doing that."
"I know," said Mrs. Home. "He is dreadful! Last time he was here he gave
me a pearl-brooch that must have cost him fifty pounds."
"That was to induce you to run away with him," remarked Philip. "That
was quite understood, and I think you behaved rather badly in not doing
so."
"Philip, you mustn't!"
"No, nor must you! And now I'm going on the river. If I get drowned it
will be your fault for having suggested it."
"Ah, do be careful in those locks," said Mrs. Home. "I get so nervous
always when the water goes down and down."
"There's more chance of getting drowned when it goes up and up," said
her son, kissing her on the forehead as he passed her chair.
Philip Home at the age of thirty-one was, perhaps, as successful a man
of his age as any in the financial world. His father, the head of one of
the big South African houses, had died some five years before, and since
then the burden of a very large and prosperous house had rested almost
entirely on his shoulders, which physically as well as morally were
broad. But he combined in an extraordinary degree the dash and
initiative of youth with a cool-headedness and sobriety of judgment
which, in general is not achieved until something of the fire of the
other is lost, and his management was both brilliant and safe. Yet, as
must always happen, the habit of mind necessary to the successful
conduct of large financial interests, which among other ingredients is
made up of incessant watchfulness and a certain hardness in judging and
acting, had, it must be confessed, somewhat tinged his whole character,
and the world in general was right in its estimate of him as a man who
was rather brusque and unsympathetic, a man with an iron hand who did
not always even remember to put on the velvet glove. This was a
perfectly just conclusion as far as the world in general, that is to
say, the world of mere acquaintances, was concerned, and Philip's fine
collection of prints was considered to be regarded by him as an
investment rather than a joy. They made the same judgment about his
garden, thinking that the rarity of plants was a quality more
highly-prized by him than their beauty. But where the world in general
did him an injustice was that they did not allow for a circle which,
though small, was far more intimate and vastly more competent to form
the true estimate of the man than they, the circle of friends. These
were four in number--his mother, Madge Ellington, namely--and the two
men to whom allusion has already been made, namely--the Hermit and
Evelyn Dundas. They saw, all four of them, a perfectly different Philip
to him who somewhat elbowed his way through the uninteresting ranks of
acquaintances, or sat, detached from the real essential man, in his
orderly office, harsh-faced, unsmiling and absorbed. And this essential
Philip in his own sanctum, where only these four ever came, was, indeed,
a very lovable and eager personage; and though the world did not know
it, his prints really hung there, and in the windows his flowers
blossomed. But few were admitted there, and those only not on business.
So this very efficient person, if we rate efficiency, as seems to be the
fashion, by the amount of income-tax annually harvested by the State,
left the shade of the house and his mother sitting there, whistled for
the two fox-terriers that lay dozing in the shade and went off towards
the river. The smile which he wore when in his sanctum of intimates
still lingered on his face as he passed down the stone steps to the
croquet lawn below, but then it faded. Nor did the gardener who was
mowing the lawn smile.
"I gave orders it was to be mown yesterday morning," said Philip; "and
it is only half done yet. Did you receive those orders or not?"
The man, a huge young Hercules, touched his cap.
"Yes, sir; at least----"
"There is no 'at least,'" said Philip. "If you can't do as you are told
you will have to go."
And he whistled--that Philip who was a parody of himself--to the dogs,
and went on.
But before he had got down to the river the official Philip had
dispersed, mistlike, in the glorious golden blaze of the summer
afternoon, and the man his mother knew (she would scarcely, indeed, have
recognised the other) had taken his place again, and as he rowed lazily
down the river he gave himself up to mere receptivity of the full-blown
beauty that was shed broadcast on sky and land and water. The spring had
long been backward and wet, but now the pitiless rains of April bore a
glorious and iridescent fruit. Brimful ran the stream from bank to bank,
one sheet of untarnished crystal, reflecting the luminous turquoise of
the sky. To his right stretched meadows all golden with the flowering of
the buttercup; and cattle, knee-deep in the feathery foliage, grazed
contentedly, or stood in the shallows of the river to drink, breathing
out long soft breaths of kine-fragrance. Between the fields stood elms,
stalwart towers of innumerable leaf, and a little way below the red
roofs of Pangbourne nestled among red and white flowering thorns. One
such tree, a cascade of crimson blossom, grew near the river brink, and
Philip paused on his oars a moment as he passed, for the sprays of
colour were outlined by the vivid blue of the sky, and on either side
stretched the incredible gold of the buttercups. No artist dared have
painted that, yet how simple and how triumphantly successful! To the
left the sun was just sinking beneath the high lines of wooded hills,
and already the tide of clear warm shadow was beginning to advance
across the stream. In the woods that covered the hills every shade of
green, from the pale milkiness of young beech to the dark velvet of the
oak, were mingled together, and glowed as if lit from within with the
flakes of sunlight that filtered through the leaves. But that divine
restfulness of various green was, somehow less to Philip's mind than the
shouting colours of the sunlit fields. For the tides of life, the
strong, sweeping currents of vitality, of love, of the work without
which the active brain grows hungry and starves, were dashing in
headstrong race within him, and rest and tranquility and soft brooding
over what has been seemed to him a poor substitute for the eager
harvesting of youth. His sickle was in his hand, and he pressed eagerly
forward through the ripening corn of life that fell in swathes to his
sweeping strokes.
The little party who were assembling at his house that afternoon were to
stay with him a week of Whitsuntide. He would, he expected, be probably
obliged to go up to London for the inside of the last two days of their
stay, but he had managed--chiefly by means of working some sixteen
hours out of the twenty-four during the last week--to secure for himself
five days of complete holiday. Like a wise man, he had refused to pepper
his house with mere acquaintances when friends were there, and with only
one out of his four guests did he, like his mother, not feel on terms of
intimacy. Her presence, however, as Madge's mother, was a matter of
necessity, and Philip did not hide from himself the fact that she
certainly favoured his suit. For Lady Ellington, as Mrs. Home had
already remarked, was a very practical woman, and it seemed to her, in
her own phrasing, that Madge could scarcely "do better." Her practical
sense, it may be remarked, was like an all-fitting handle with a smart
steel spring which grasped whatever was presented to it in firm
tentacles; and the proper way of sweeping carpets, the right board wages
for scullery-maids, the correct lead with doubled no trumps at bridge,
were as clearly defined in her mind as the desirability of wealth in
sons'-in-law. She was, it may be added, extremely generous with advice,
being anxious to lay open to all the world the multifarious discoveries
of her master-mind.
Lady Ellington was certainly a very handsome woman, and the passage of
the glacier of years over her face and her mind had produced hardly any
striations either on the one or the other. Her bodily health was superb,
and she took the utmost care of it; while, since one of her most
constantly applied maxims was to let no sadness or worry weigh on her,
her mind had by this time become something like a very hard, bright,
polished globe which it was impossible to dint or damage. She had
strolled after tea with her hostess and Madge to the croquet lawn,
leaving Evelyn Dundas and Tom Merivale to smoke and await Philip's
return from the river. The gardener there was still engaged in his
belated mowing, and Lady Ellington examined the cutter with a
magisterial air.
"Very old-fashioned and heavy," she said. "You should get the new light
American type. It does far more work, and a boy with it can get through
what it takes a man to do with a heavier machine. How many gardeners do
you keep, Mrs. Home."
The poor lady shook her head.
"I don't really know," she said. "How many are there of you, Hawkins?"
Lady Ellington sniffed rather contemptuously.
"The labour-sheet will tell you," she said. "Why are there no flower
borders on this lawn?"
"Ah, that is Philip's plan," said his mother, delighted to be able to
refer the inquisitor to another source. "He says that they get so
trampled by people looking for balls."
"I should have thought wire-netting would have obviated that," said Lady
Ellington. "Under the north wall there is an excellent aspect.
Personally, I should put bulbs here. And the rose garden is below, is it
not? Certainly Mr. Home keeps his garden in fairly good order."
This concession, though not altogether unqualified, was fully
appreciated by Mrs. Home.
"I'm sure he spends enough on it," she said.
Lady Ellington laughed.
"That is the surest way of getting satisfactory results," she said. "It
is all nonsense to say that flowers do best in the gardens of those that
love them, unless that love takes the practical form of spending money
on them. And in the latter case, they do equally well if you hate them!"
This was in the best Ellingtonian manner, hard and clean-cut and
glittering--there was nothing foggy about it--and it represented very
fairly Lady Ellington's method of dealing with life. Love or hatred did
not seem to her to matter very particularly; the dinner of herbs, at any
rate, in the house of love was markedly less attractive to her than the
well-ordered house of hate, and she could do without friends better than
without a motor-car. She had had rather a hard tussel with life, and
shrewd blows had been given on both sides; she had lost her money and
her husband during the last few years, and, being without a son, the
title and estates had gone to her husband's nephew, a man for whom for
years she had felt, and indeed shown, an extreme dislike. Her jointure
was narrow, and she had only got her motor-car by the simple expedient
of ordering it but not paying for it. But of the two combatants--life
and herself--life was at last beginning to get the worst of it. Certain
speculations she had lately indulged in had brought her in money, and if
once she could marry her daughter to Philip, she felt that this would be
a knock-down blow to life, and her struggles on this side of the grave
would be over. What might happen on the other side concerned her very
little.
Madge meantime, while this short cross-examination had been going on,
strolled a little behind the other two, with a faint smile of amusement
in her eyes. She had inherited all her mother's beauty, and dark violet
eyes glowed beneath her black lashes. Her nose was a little tip-tilted,
as if raised in curiosity about things in general, but her mouth
somewhat contradicted that, for it drooped a little at the corners, as
if to imply that her curiosity when satisfied proved rather
disappointing. Curiosity and a shade of contempt, indeed, were the
emotions most strongly in evidence on her face, and the
observer--allowing that features may represent the character of their
owner rather than that of her ancestry--would perhaps conclude that her
habitual view of the world was of the kind that tends to laugh at rather
than with that admirable comedy. Otherwise her face was strangely
sexless; it was, indeed, more the face of a boy than of a girl. Even
among tall women she was tall, and by her side Mrs. Home looked more
than ever like a figure of Dresden china.
Lady Ellington after her sympathetic remark about flowers, turned to her
daughter.
"Well situated, is it not, Madge?" she said. "And the river is below
there. You will be all day on it, I expect, if Mr. Home is kind enough
to take you. And who else is here, Mrs. Home?"
"Ah, there is no party at all, I am afraid," said she. "Philip said that
acquaintances mix so badly with friends. Only Mr. Dundas and Mr.
Merivale."
Lady Ellington thought this over for a moment, and the conclusion
apparently was most satisfactory.
"That is charming of him!" she said. "It is always a compliment to be
asked to a small party; whereas, if you have a houseful it doesn't
matter who is there. Dear me, those roses should be cut much further
back, if they are to do any good. But it is quite true; if one asks
friends and acquaintances together, the friends always wonder why the
acquaintances have been asked, and the acquaintances are disgusted that
nobody takes any notice of them. And I particularly want your son's
advice on some shares I have lately purchased. Mr. Dundas, too--I am so
glad to meet him. They say his portraits are going up in price so. I
wonder if he could be induced--just a little sketch---- Ah, there is
Mr. Home coming up from the river. I wonder why he wears a dark coat on
so hot a day?"
A little curiosity perhaps lingered in Madge's face when she met Philip,
and certainly the contempt all vanished. She had a great respect and
liking for him, and her whole expression brightened when she saw him.
Then after greetings they strolled on, the two elder ladies in front.
"Mother has a great many questions to ask you," she said to him in a
gentle, slow, but very audible voice. "She wants to know how many
gardeners you have, why you don't cut your roses back and something
about South African mines."
Philip's habit of neatness and instinct of gardening led him to stop a
moment and nip off a couple of ill-localised buds from a rose. In effect
the two others got a little further ahead of them. This may or may not
have been intentional.
"All my information is at her service," he said--"particularly on the
subject of roses, about which I know more than South African mines."
"And care more!" suggested Madge.
"Infinitely more. Are they not clearly more attractive?"
Madge looked at him curiously.
"I believe you really think so," she said. "And that is so odd. Doesn't
the scheming, the calculation, the foresight required in financial
things interest you enormously?"
"Certainly; but I scheme just as much over the roses. Whether this one
is to have--well, a whisky-and-soda, or whether it is rheumatic and
wants a lowering treatment; that is just as interesting in itself as
whether South Africans want lowering or screwing up."
"You mean you can do that? You can send things up or down? You can say
to us, to mother: 'You shall be poorer to-morrow or richer'?"
Philip laughed.
"I suppose so, to some extent. Pray don't let us talk about it. It
sounds rather brutal, and I am afraid it is brutalising. Yet, after all,
a landlord may put up the rent of his houses."
Madge Ellington walked on for a few paces without replying.
"How odd of you," she said at length, "not to feel the fascination of
power. I don't mean to say that one would necessarily want to use it,
but it must be so divine to know it is there. Well, if you wish, I won't
talk about it."
Philip turned to her, his brown thin face looking suddenly eager.
"Ah, I would sooner hear you talk about what you please than about what
I please," he said.
She laughed.
"Can't I manage to combine the two?" she said. "The river, for instance,
I think we both love that. Will you promise to let me live on the river
while I am here?"
"I warn you that you will have a good deal of my company, then," said
he.
She laughed again.
"But as you are my host I can't decently object," she said. "Oh, tell
me, Mr. Home, what is Mr. Dundas like? You are a great friend of his,
are you not? He was at tea, and asked a series of the silliest riddles,
which somehow made me giggle. Giggle hopelessly, do you understand; they
were so stupid. And he is the Mr. Dundas, who paints everybody as if
they were so much more interesting than they are?"
"Yes, evidently the same," said Philip. "And what you say is quite true.
Yet, again, as you say, his conversation is futile beyond words."
Madge walked on again in silence a little.
"I think that combination is rather charming," she said. "People don't
laugh enough, and certainly he makes one laugh. I wish I laughed more,
for instance."
"And has Merivale come?" asked Philip.
"Yes; he was at tea, too. What does he do?"
"He doesn't do anything. He just thinks."
"Good heavens! how frightfully fatiguing. All the time, do you mean?"
"Yes, all the time. Have you never met him before? Yet, how should you?
He lives in the New Forest, and communes with birds and animals. People
think he is mad, but he is the sanest person I know."
"Why?" asked she.
"Because he has had the wit to find out what he likes, and to do it all
the time."
"And what is that?" asked the girl.
"He sits by a stream and looks at the water. Then he lies on his back
and looks at the sky. Then he whistles, chuckles, what you please to
call it, and the thrushes come scudding out of the bushes and chuckle
back at him."
"Is that not rather uncanny?" asked Madge.
"Most uncanny. Some day, as I tell him, he will see Pan. And I shall
then have to attend a funeral."
The girl's eyebrows wrinkled into a frown.
"Pan?" she said.
"Yes; he is the God of 'Go as you please!' And his temple is a lunatic
asylum. But don't be alarmed. The Hermit won't go into a lunatic asylum
yet awhile."
"The Hermit?"
"Yes, the Hermit is Merivale. Because he lives quite alone in the New
Forest. He never reads, he hardly ever sees anybody, he never does
anything. He used to write at one time."
Madge shivered slightly.
"How intensely uncomfortable!" she said. "I think I shall like Mr.
Dundas best."
"You are sure to like him."
"Because everybody does? That is the worst of reasons. I always distrust
very popular people."
"The judgment of the world is usually wrong, you mean. But occasionally
one stumbles on an exception."
The four had turned back towards the house, and as Philip spoke, he and
his companion gained the top step of the gravelled square bordered by
flower-beds, where he had sat two hours ago with his mother. The shadow
of the house had swung over it, and in the gathering dusk the
flower-beds glowed with a dim subaqueous radiance. Philip's mother and
Lady Ellington had already passed into the open French window of the
drawing-room, but on the stout balustrade of the terrace there sat a
young man. One long slim leg rested on the gravel, the other was crooked
round the lead vase at the head of the steps. His face, extraordinarily
boyish, was clean-shaven, or rather so boyish was it, that it looked as
if it was still untouched by razor. He held a cigarette in one hand, and
the other, long-fingered and white as a woman's, grasped his knee.
"Oh, Philip!" he cried; "how are you? Oddly enough, I am quite well. I
always was, like Sydney Smith and his great coat. Isn't there time for
a game of croquet before dinner? Let's all be late, and so we shall all
be punctual; it is only a question of degree. Miss Ellington, do come
and play. Why did the barmaid champagne, and--oh, I asked you that.
Stout, porter is rather good though. I do believe you know it, Philip."
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