... Clovelly was in rare form.--Don’t run away with the idea that he’s eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the race for Miss Treherne. For my part--but, never mind!--You had phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don’t arrange for an early marriage. You are a perfect baby in some things. Don’t you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him? And Clovelly is here on the ground, and they are in the same set, and though I’d take my oath she would be loyal to you if you were ten thousand miles from here for ten years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise and a fancy are two different things. We may do what’s right for the fear o’ God, and not love Him either. Marmion, let the marriage bells be rung early--a maiden’s heart is a ticklish thing.... But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it, and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with laughter. At first every one stared aghast (“stared aghast!”--how is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then haw-hawed till he couldn’t lift his champagne, the rest of us followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than gently smile. “See here,” he said ever so candidly of Clovelly’s best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified figure in the book--“I liked the way you drew that muff. He was such an awful outsider, wasn’t he? All talk, and hypocrite down to his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went ‘slumming’ and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!”-- [This was Clovelly’s heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said himself, “with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness, and a sweet creation altogether.”] “I said, that’s poetic justice, that’s the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture. He said, ‘Go to blazes,’ and he fixed up that marriage--and there you are! Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!” Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow. What he said of myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round, with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.