'What a lark it would be,' Faussett cried, 'if we were to get him up here just now, offer him some wine, to which he pretends he has a conscientious objection--unless somebody else pays for it--make him drink success to the cause of total abstinence, keep filling up his glass till we make him dead drunk, and then set him at the window in a paper cap to sing “John Barleycorn.”' Gillingham's thin lip curled visibly. 'Your humour, my dear boy,' he said, patting Faussett on the back, 'is English--English--essentially English. It reminds me of Gilray. It lacks point and fineness. Your fun is like your neckties--loud, too loud! You must cultivate your mind (if any) by a diligent study of the best French models. I would recommend, for my part, as an efficient antidote, a chapter of De Maupassant and an ode of François Coppée's every night and morning.' 'But if Plantagenet's poor,' one more tolerant lad put in apologetically, 'it's natural enough, after all, he shouldn't want to join the club. It's precious expensive, you know, Gillingham. It runs into money.' The Born Poet was all sweet reasonableness. 'To be poor, my dear Matthews,' he said, with a charming smile, turning round to the objector, 'as Beau Brummell remarked about a rent in one's coat, is an accident that may happen to any gentleman any day; but a patch, you must recognise, is premeditated poverty. The man Plan-tagenet may be as poor as he chooses, so far as I'm concerned; I approve of his being poor. What so picturesque, so affecting, so poetical, indeed, as honest poverty? But to pretend he doesn't _care_ for wine--that's quite another matter. There the atrocity comes in--the vulgarian atrocity. For I call such a statement nothing short of vulgar.' He raised his glass once more, and eyed the light of the lamp through the amethystine claret with poetic appreciation. 'Now give the hautboys breath,' he cried, breaking out once more in a fit of fine dithyrambic inspiration; 'he comes! he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and ever young, Drinking joys did first ordain. Bacchus' blessings are a treasure; Drinking is the soldier's pleasure. Rich the tr-r-reasure. Sweet the pleasure. Sweet is pleasure after pain.' And when Gillingham said that, with his studiously unstudied air of profound afflatus, everybody in the company felt convinced at once that Plantagenet's teetotalism, real or hypocritical, simply hadn't got a leg left to stand upon. They turned for consolation to the Carlsbad plums and the candied cherries.