Mr. Mercaptan, it seemed, had left London. His housekeeper had a long story to tell. A regular Bolshevik had come yesterday, pushing in. And she had heard him shouting at Mr. Mercaptan in his own room. And then, luckily, a lady had come and the Bolshevik had gone away again. And this morning Mr. Mercaptan had decided, quite sudden like, to go away for two or three days. And it wouldn’t surprise her at all if it had something to do with that horrible Bolshevik fellow. Though of course Master Paster hadn’t said anything about it. Still, as she’d known him when he was so high and seen him grow up like, she thought she could say she knew him well enough to guess why he did things. It was only brutally that they contrived to tear themselves away. Secure, meanwhile, behind a whole troop of butlers and footmen, Mr. Mercaptan was dining comfortably at Oxhanger with the most faithful of his friends and admirers, Mrs. Speegle. It was to Mrs. Speegle that he had dedicated his coruscating little ‘Loves of the Pachyderms’; for Mrs. Speegle it was who had suggested, casually one day at luncheon, that the human race ought to be classified in two main species—the Pachyderms, and those whose skin, like her own, like Mr. Mercaptan’s and a few others’, was fine and ‘responsive,’ as Mr. Mercaptan himself put it, ‘to all caresses, including those of pure reason.’ Mr. Mercaptan had taken the casual hint and had developed it, richly. The barbarous Pachyderms he divided up into a number of subspecies: steatocephali, acephali, theolaters, industrious Judæorhynci—busy, compact and hard as dung-beetles—Peabodies, Russians and so on. It was all very witty and delicately savage. Mr. Mercaptan had a standing invitation at Oxhanger. With dangerous pachyderms like Lypiatt ranging loose about the town, he thought it best to avail himself of it. Mrs. Speegle, he knew, would be delighted to see him. And indeed she was. He arrived just at lunch-time. Mrs. Speegle and Maisie Furlonger were already at the fish. “Mercaptan!” Mrs. Speegle’s soul seemed to be in the name. “Sit down,” she went on, cooing as she talked, like a ring-dove. There seemed to be singing in every word she spoke. She pointed to a chair next to hers. “N’you’re n’just in time to tell us all about _n’your_ Lesbian experiences.” And Mercaptan, giving vent to his fully orchestrated laugh—squeal and roar together—had sat down and, speaking in French partly, he nodded towards the butler and the footman, ‘_à cause des valets_,’ and partly because the language lent itself more deliciously to this kind of confidences, he had begun there and then, interrupted and spurred on by the cooing of Mrs. Speegle and the happy shrieks of Maisie Furlonger, to recount at length and with all the wit in the world his experience among the Isles of Greece. How delicious it was, he said to himself, to be with really civilized people! In this happy house it seemed scarcely possible to believe that such a thing as a pachyderm existed.