This is what Mr. Challis is writing now: "... I like the talky chap better than the son and heir. He's a lord. They neither of them take to me because I'm not 'Varsity. I came down in the train with them, only not the same carriage. I rode third, of course; there were no seconds." The writer felt that it was very clever of the thirds to be thirds at all when there were no seconds, but decided not to write it--as too subtle for the intellect of his impossible she--and wrote on: "I saw them playing cards in a smoking-carriage, and recognized the son and heir by his portrait. It isn't a bit like him. There's a fat pink politician here, with little eyes, who talks thirty-two to the dozen. His name is Ramsey Tomes. He pinned my host as he was coming from the dinner-table, and detained him ever so long. We heard the rumble of his rounded periods afar"--will she understand that? thought the writer--"long after everyone else had followed the womankind to the drawing-room. However, they came up in time for the music, and I heard Mr. Tomes assuring Sir Murgatroyd that his respect for that Bart was so intense that he would reconsider the whole of his political opinions forthwith, but without the slightest expectation of changing one jot or one tittle of them." Here the writer abstained, consideratively, with his pen delayed over the inkstand, from inditing that he had never met with a "tittle" out of the company of its invariable jot. That would be too deep for this wife of his. He brought the pen slowly into the arena again. "Sir Murgatroyd repeated the same sentiment in several different words. As for all the other people, I must tell about them gradually, or leave them till I come home. The younger daughter, Sibyl--that's how to spell her name--not Sybil, remember--strikes me as a little waspish. Judith, the other, is a tall, handsome woman, with a figure expensive to dress but a little _prepotente_." He let this word stand, having written it, though he felt sure that the impossible one's Italian would not cover it. He did not mind leaving her to choose a meaning for it; it franked him of any responsibility. Then he thought he had written enough, and ended up: "You need not be uneasy about my neuralgia. I feel better already and shall have a hot bath first thing in the morning.--Your loving mate, A. C." But he added an amends for an omission--"Kiss the kids from me." Then he betrayed further uneasiness of conscience by saying to himself: "After all, she's much better at home with the babies. She would never get on among these people." Whether it occurred to the good gentleman that he had it in his power to alter the position of the pieces on the board we do not know. If it did, the idea soon vanished behind a speculation whether the next guest after him would have a new acreage of clean sheet and pillow all to himself; and if not, what a lot of washing went for nothing! He almost wished he was a chimney-sweep, to make it valid. CHAPTER IV