But since Another, if you insist, Will be cutting in with his mailed fist, I shall be asked to a general scrap All over the European map, Dragged into somebody else's war, For that's what a _double entente_ is for. Well, if I must, I shall have to fight For the love of a bounding Balkanite; But O what a tactless choice of time, When the bathing season is at its prime! And _how_ I should hate to miss my chance Of wallowing off the coast of France! O. S. * * * * * CUT FLOWERS. "Do you notice anything particularly queer about this house, Charles," I asked him, "now that Araminta has been forced to fly from it?" (Araminta had gone home to visit her parents, not so much, as I explained to Charles, because she was tired of living with me as because I had invited him to come on a visit. She was to return on the following day after a fortnight's absence, and I had promised faithfully to evict him before she came). "Except," said Charles, "that it is usual to offer one's guests the most comfortable arm-chair in the messuage and not to eat all the fattest strawberries oneself, I can't say that I do;" and he fluffed a second mashie pitch with his cigar ash well short of the drawing-room fender. "You don't," I insisted, "remark any unusual hiatus in the household arrangements--anything that obviously betrays the absence of the feminine touch? I suppose you know what this is?" and I took from the mantelpiece a tall slender silver object. "It seems to be a tin trumpet," replied Charles, "and why on earth you can't keep my godson's toys in the nursery, instead of littering them about----" "Tin trumpet," I said cleverly, "be blowed! It is a vase--variously pronounced to rhyme with 'parse' or 'pause,' according to one's pretensions to gentility. It is a flower-vase, Chawles, and, what is more, there ought to be flowers in it. The whole house, let me tell you, should be a very garden of fragrant and luscious blooms. Instead of which it is full of mocking cenotaphs such as this. When Araminta went away she flung over her shoulder a parasol and a Parthian taunt. She said, 'I'm certain there'll be no flowers in the house while I'm away,' and now it seems she was jolly well right." "Why ever can't the servants attend to the flowers?" said Charles lazily. "They seem to be fairly competent people. There were four match-boxes and _The Return of Sherlock Holmes_ in my bedroom."