"Think so? She will do it, though," replied my renegade friend confidently. "She is a very capable girl. Regards me as her mission in life. I feel jolly proud about it, I can tell you--like one of those reformed drunkards they stand up on the platform to tell people what a Nut he used to be in the old days, and look at him now! By the way, I promised Hilda I would n’t use the word ’Nut’ any more. Check me if I become too colloquial, old son. Hilda is rather down on what she calls my ’inability to express myself in rational English.’" "Colloquialism was not formerly a failing of yours, Freak," I said. "As a small boy you were rather inclined the other way." "As a small boy, yes," agreed The Freak. "But it is not easy to maintain the pedantic habit at a public school," he added feelingly. "Do you remember once," I continued, "telling old Hanbury, when he dropped upon you for giggling in form, that your ’risible faculties had been unduly excited by the bovine immobility of Bailey minor’?" "Yes, I remember. Hilda would have been proud of me that day," replied The Freak, sighing over his lost talent. "Now she thinks me too flippant and easy-going. Lacking in dignity, and so forth. But if you watch me carefully during your stay here you will find that I have very largely regained my old form. I am getting frightfully intellectual. You ought to see us reading Browning together before breakfast. It is a sublime spectacle. Talking of sublime spectacles, we are all going to Laxley Races on Tuesday, and I can give you an absolutely dead snip for the Cup." The next ten minutes were devoted to a conversation which, from the point of view both of subject-matter and expression, must have undone the regenerative work of several weeks. Fortunately Miss Beverley was adorning herself for dinner at the time--the most austere feminine intellect goes into _mufti_, so to speak, between the hours of seven and eight P.M.--and we made our provisional selections for Tuesday’s programme undisturbed. The student of Browning finished scribbling down the names of horses on the back of an envelope. "That is all right," he said. "Plumstone for the Shotley Stakes, Little Emily for the Maiden Plate, and Gigadibs or Jedfoot for the big race. The others can keep. Shall we go up and dress for dinner?" I agreed, and we knocked out our pipes. "What do you think, by the way," enquired The Freak casually, "of little Connie Damer?" I told him. We were late for dinner. II A shy but observant male, set down in an English country-house, soon realises, especially when he has been compelled for a period of years to rely for amusement almost entirely upon his own society, the truth of the saying that the proper study of mankind is Man--with which is incorporated Woman.