We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs--all the useless things. He really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by. He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs. Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the height of fashion--as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have seen mold-spotted fashion plates of the period. She had a muslin chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet. Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s. How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca--cold water to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water! There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman, except at my laundress--and they are hardly women. Orion apologized for the water as we walked home. “The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me, my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way she wags her head about--paralysis. She’ll go off like a champagne cork some day.” “I suppose she will,” I said wearily. “Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.” I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth. We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the second floor at No. 8. “I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to Orion. He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes, looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg. Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling, straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him was ill-hung and undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair, fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will fair men persist in wearing fawn?