Mr Lambert helped himself to a Marcovitch from a box on the table, drew up an easy-chair to the fire and sank into it with a sigh. "It seems funny," said he in a meditative tone, "that I should be sitting here smoking and yarning with you to-night, and only yesterday, so to speak, we were fighting like bull-dogs; but we're friends now, and you must come and see me when you're back in town. You live in the 'Albany'? I had rooms there once, years ago--years ago. Lord! what a change has come over London since the days when Evans' was stuffed of a night with all manner of people--the rows and ructions I remember! The things that went on. One night in Evans' I remember an old gentleman coming in and ordering a chop, and no sooner had he put on his spectacles and settled down to it with a smile all over his face, than Bob O'Grady, of the 10th--Black O'Grady--who'd been watching him--he was drunk as a lord--rose up and said, ''Scuse me,' he said, and took the chop by the shank-bone and flung it on the stage. A man could take his whack in those days, and be none the worse for it; but men are different, somehow, now, and they go in for tea and muffins and nerves just as the women used to, when I was twenty; and the women, begad, are the best men now'days. Look at Miss Pursehouse! as charming as a woman and as clever as a man. Look at this house of hers! One would think a man owned it, everything is so well done: brandies and sodas at your elbows, matches all over the place, and electric bells and a telephone. That's the sort of woman for me--not that I'm not fond of the old-fashioned sort of woman too. Fanny, my daughter--I must introduce you to her--is as old-fashioned as they make 'em. Screeches if she sees a rat, and knows nothing of woman's rights or the higher education of females, and is always ready to turn on the water-works, bless her heart! ready and willing to cry over anything you may put before her that's got the ghost of a cry in it. But, bless you! what's the good of talking about old-fashioned or modern women? From Hecuba down, they're all the same--born to deceive us and make our lives happy." "Can't see how a woman that deceives a man can make him happy." "My dear fellow, sure, what's happiness but illusion, and what's illusion but deception, and talking about deception, aren't men--the blackguards!--just as bad at deceiving as women?" Mr Bevan made no reply to this; he shifted uneasily in his chair. "You live at Highgate?" he said. Lambert woke up from a reverie he had fallen into with a start. "Yes, bad luck to it! I've got a house there I can't get rid of, and, talking of old-fashioned things, it's an old-fashioned house. There aren't any electric bells, and if there were you'd as likely as not ring up the ghost. For there's a ghost there, sure enough; she nearly frightened the gizzard out of my butler James."