"Yes. You see, an idea suddenly came to me. I thought about you and Pat and how Pat, in spite of all my arguments, wouldn't look at you, and all at once there flashed across me what I took to be the explanation. Something seemed to whisper to me that the reason Pat couldn't see you with a spy glass was that all these years she had been secretly pining for me." "What on earth made you think that?" "Looking back on it now, in a clear and judicial frame of mind, I can see that it was the claret cup. That and the general ghastly, soppy atmosphere of a wedding. I sat straight down, John, old man, and I wrote a letter to Pat, asking her to marry me. I was filled with a sort of divine pity for the poor girl." "Why do you call her the poor girl? She wasn't married to you." "And then I had a moment of sense, so I thought that before I posted the letter I'd go for a stroll and think it over. I left the letter on Ronnie's desk, and got my hat and took a turn round the Serpentine. And, what with the fresh air and everything, pretty soon I found Reason returning to her throne. I had been on the very brink, I realized, of making a most consummate chump of myself. Here I was, I reflected, on the threshold of a career, when it was vitally necessary that I should avoid all entanglements, and concentrate myself wholly on my life work, deliberately going out of my way to get myself hitched up. I'm not saying anything against Pat. Don't think that. We've always been the best of pals, and if I were backed into a corner and made to marry someone I'd just as soon it was her. It was the principle of the thing that was all wrong, if you see what I mean. Entanglements. I had to keep myself clear of them." Hugo paused and glanced down at the water of the Skirme, as if debating the advisability of throwing himself into it. After a while he resumed. "I was bunging a bit of wedding cake to the Serpentine ducks when I got this flash of clear vision, and I turned straight round and legged it back to the flat to destroy that letter. And when I got there the letter had gone. And the bride's mother, a stout old lady with a cast in the left eye, who was still hanging about the kitchen, finishing up the remains of the wedding feast, told me without a tremor in her voice, with her mouth full of lobster mayonnaise, that she had given it to Bessemer to post on his way to the station." "So there you were," said John.