From the way in which he still laughed there must have been a specific occasion for his mirth. I knew of none such. I wished to know, however, and I also wished to know what he meant by "fun." Young men mean so many things by "fun," and it--But I stifled something within my breast almost before it was born there. When I spoke, my voice was as steady as it has ever been in my life; but the devil, watching a soul that hesitates on the point of sin, does not watch more closely than I watched that fair boy with the cigarette dangling from his upper lip. "Ah, yes, I've seen her.... _Pretty, too_," I hinted. But he put, if he heard, her prettiness aside. He chuckled again. "I went last Sunday to the Zoo, you know," he said. "They were spending the week-end in town--my folks. And I saw her there. Or rather, I didn't see her at first, it was Mumsie who saw her. 'I think there's somebody you know,' she says to me, and I looked, and there she was, bowing to me. Then up came pater--he'd dropped behind somewhere--and blest if he didn't know her aunt--she lives with her aunt--they have rooms in Woburn Place. So we all went round together.... I started the fun by saying how like old Weston the secretary bird was; so we went round looking for likenesses--raked up everybody we knew----" He stopped, suddenly. He wouldn't, had he been a year or two older, have pulled himself up quite so sharply. It is true he didn't go so far as to colour, stammer, or bite his lip; but his meaning, or his inadvertence, or whatever you like to call it, could hardly have been plainer had he done all these things. An anecdote was related to me not so very long ago by an agent I employ to advise me in my picture-buying. It was of the most sardonic of our caricaturists, and this merciless artist had (so the story ran) refused to caricature a certain person, giving as his reason that, while a vain or over-praised or too consciously handsome face was fair game for his ironic pencil, a face already heavily visited by nature went free. But for Archie Merridew's sudden embarrassed check I might have imagined that _my_ own visage might have gone free also. It is, after all, not repellent. I bear quite a strong resemblance to at least one public man whose photographs appear in the illustrated papers--a distinguished scientist. My stature is the most striking thing about me, and if your humour takes that turn you can find remote suggestions of any number of people at the Zoo. I made, however, no sign, and he, judging his clumsiness to have passed unnoticed, went on: "Funny the pater knowing her aunt like that, wasn't it? Rather fun though. Mumsie said she must come down to Guildford for a few days and stay with us; if she does I shall go home that week-end--you bet!"