"The Jebber," he said, "is a poisonous growth called Jebson. He is in his first year. He owns bags of money, which he squanders in the wrong manner on every occasion. He runs after Blues and other celebrities, but has never caught one yet. On the other hand, he is rude to porters and bedmakers. He gathers unto himself bands of admiring smugs and tells them of the fast life he lives in town. He plays no games of any kind, except a little billiards with the marker, but he buttonholes you outside Hall in the evening and tells you how much he has won by backing the winner of the three o’clock race by wire. I think he has a kind of vague notion that he is sowing wild oats; but as he seems quite incapable of speaking the truth, I have no idea whether he is the vicious young mug he makes himself out to be or is merely endeavouring to impress us yokels. That is the sort of customer The Jebber is." "And you have invited him to dinner?" I said. "Yes; it’s like this. We stood him as well as we could for quite a long while. Then, one evening, he turned up in my rooms when half a dozen of us were there--he is on my staircase, and I had rashly called upon him his first term--and after handing out a few fairy tales about his triumphs as a lady’s man, he pulled a photograph from his pocket and passed it round. It was a girl--a jolly pretty girl, too! He said he was engaged to her. Said it as if--" The Freak’s honest face grew suddenly hot, and his fingers bit ferociously into my arm. "Well, he began to talk about her. Said she was ’fearfully mashed on him!’ That fairly turned our stomachs to begin with, but there was more to come. He confided to us that she was a dear little thing, but not quite up to his form; and he did n’t intend to marry her until he had sown a few more of his rotten wild oats. And so on. That settled me, Tiny! So far I had not been so fierce about him as the other men. I had considered him just a harmless bounder, who would tone down when he got into the ways of the place. But a fellow who would talk like that before a roomful of men about a girl--his own girl--My God, Tiny! what would you do with such a thing?" "Kill it," I said simply. "That’s what we nearly did, on the spot," said Dicky. "But--well--one feels a delicacy about even taking notice of that sort of stuff. You understand?" I nodded. The reserve of the youthful male on affairs of the heart is much deeper than that of the female, though the female can never recognise the fact.