"But you _must_," Mark said--and it was a tremendous concession to sentimentality--"take enough to make you comfortable." "By God!" Christopher exclaimed. "I loathe your whole beastly buttered toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication. . . ." He was carried away, as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. . . . "You won't," he repeated, "be a penny the poorer by me." Mark said: "Well, you needn't get shirty about it. If you won't you won't. We'd better move on. You've only just time. We'll say that settles it. . . . Are you, or aren't you, overdrawn at your bank? I'll make that up, whatever you damn well do to stop it." "I'm not overdrawn," Christopher said. "I'm over thirty pounds in credit, and I've an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a mistake of the bank's." Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England. They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved like marionettes practising crucifixions. "By God!" he said, "this is the last of England. . . . There's only my department where they never make mistakes. I tell you, if there were any mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!" He added: "But don't you think that I'm going to give up comfort, I'm not. My Charlotte makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she's got a tap of French rum that's saved my life over and over again after a beastly wet day's racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a Frenchwoman for managing. . . . By God, I'd marry the doxy if she wasn't a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn't hurt me. But I couldn't stomach marrying a Papist. They're not to be trusted." "You'll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby," Christopher said. "My son's to be brought up as a Papist." Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground. "Eh, but that's a bitter one," he said. "Whatever made ye do that? . . . I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you married her." He added: "I'd not like to sleep with that wife of yours. She's too athletic. It'd be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I suppose though you're a pair of turtle doves. . . . Eh, but I'd not have thought ye would have been so weak." "I only decided this morning," Christopher said, "when my cheque was returned from the bank. You won't have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about Groby." "I can't say I have," Mark answered.