“It’s the wife, I suppose?” suggested Peter.

“She’s a dear girl. She only has one fault.”

“It’s a pretty big one,” returned Peter. “I should try and break her of it if I were you.”

“Break her of it!” cried the little man. “You might as well advise me to break a brick wall with my head. I had no idea what they were like. I never dreamt it.”

“But what is her objection to us? We are clean, we are fairly intelligent——”

“My dear Peter, do you think I haven’t said all that, and a hundred things more? A woman! she gets an idea into her head, and every argument against it hammers it in further. She has gained her notion of what she calls Bohemia from the comic journals. It’s our own fault, we have done it ourselves. There’s no persuading her that it’s a libel.”

“Won’t she see a few of us—judge for herself? There’s Porson—why Porson might have been a bishop. Or Somerville—Somerville’s Oxford accent is wasted here. It has no chance.”

“It isn’t only that,” explained Joey; “she has ambitions, social ambitions. She thinks that if we begin with the wrong set, we’ll never get into the right. We have three friends at present, and, so far as I can see, are never likely to have any more. My dear boy, you’d never believe there could exist such bores. There’s a man and his wife named Holyoake. They dine with us on Thursdays, and we dine with them on Tuesdays. Their only title to existence consists in their having a cousin in the House of Lords; they claim no other right themselves. He is a widower, getting on for eighty. Apparently he’s the only relative they have, and when he dies, they talk of retiring into the country. There’s a fellow named Cutler, who visited once at Marlborough House in connection with a charity. You’d think to listen to him that he had designs upon the throne. The most tiresome of them all is a noisy woman who, as far as I can make out, hasn’t any name at all. ‘Miss Montgomery’ is on her cards, but that is only what she calls herself. Who she really is! It would shake the foundations of European society if known. We sit and talk about the aristocracy; we don’t seem to know anybody else. I tried on one occasion a little sarcasm as a corrective—recounted conversations between myself and the Prince of Wales, in which I invariably addressed him as ‘Teddy.’ It sounds tall, I know, but those people took it in. I was too astonished to undeceive them at the time, the consequence is I am a sort of little god to them. They come round me and ask for more. What am I to do? I am helpless among them. I’ve never had anything to do before with the really first-prize idiot; the usual type, of course, one knows, but these, if you haven’t met them, are inconceivable. I try insulting them; they don’t even know I am insulting them. Short of dragging them out of their chairs and kicking them round the room, I don’t see how to make them understand it.”

“And Mrs. Loveredge?” asked the sympathetic Peter, “is she——”

“Between ourselves,” said Joey, sinking his voice to a needless whisper, seeing he and Peter were the sole occupants of the smoking-room—“I couldn’t, of course, say it to a younger man—but between ourselves, my wife is a charming woman. You don’t know her.”

“Doesn’t seem much chance of my ever doing so,” laughed Peter.

“So graceful, so dignified, so—so queenly,” continued the little man, with rising enthusiasm. “She has only one fault—she has no sense of humour.”

To Peter, as it has been said, men of forty were mere boys.

“My dear fellow, whatever could have induced you——”