Vice-Chancellor asked me to dinner on the very day when I published a most infernal and libellous lampoon about him, and I have already told you how the Proctors treat me. It is enough,” said the Babe in conclusion, “to make one take the veil, I mean the tonsure, and dry up the milk of human kindness within one.” “Hear, hear,” shouted Leamington. “Good old Babe.” The Babe glared at him a moment, with wide, indignant eyes and then went on rather shrilly: “Look at Reggie. I’m older than he is, at least I think so, and any one with a grain of sense would say that I therefore ought to know better, and what is excusable in him, is not excusable in me, but he goes and says ‘Oh’ in the street and he is treated as a dangerous character, sent home, and will be fined. I might say ‘Oh’ till Oscar Browning got into Parliament, and do you suppose they would ever consider me a dangerous character? Not they. (Here the Babe laughed in a hollow and scornful manner.) They would treat me with that infernal familiarity which I so deprecate, and say, ‘Go home, Babe.’ Babe indeed!” The Babe’s voice broke, and he flung himself into his chair after the manner of Sarah Bernhardt, and hissed out “_Misérables! Comme je les déteste!_” Leamington applauded this histrionic effort, and feeling a little better after breakfast, lit a cigarette. The maidservant came to clear breakfast away, and as she left the room the Babe resumed in the gentle, melancholy tones, which were natural to him: “If I thought it would do any good, I would go and snatch a kiss from that horrid, rat-faced girl as she is carrying the tray down stairs. But it wouldn’t, you know; it wouldn’t do any good at all. She wouldn’t complain to the landlady, or if she did it would only end in my giving her half-a-crown. Besides, I don’t in the least want to kiss her--I wouldn’t do it if she gave me half-a-crown. I wonder what George Moore would do if he were me. We’ll ask Stewart when he comes to lunch. He is intimate with all notable people. George Moore is notable isn’t he? I fancy W. H. Smith & Son boycotted him. Stewart said the other day that the Emperor of Germany was one of the nicest emperors he had ever seen.” “That’s nothing,” said Leamington. “There’s a don at Oxford who has written a book called _Princes I have Persecuted without Encouragement_.” The Babe laughed. “A companion volume to Stewart’s _Monarchs I have Met_. Not that he has written such a book. Stewart is perfectly charming, but he thinks a lot of a Prince. If he hasn’t written _Monarchs I have Met_, he ought to have.” “We all ought to have done a lot of things we haven’t done,” said Leamington. “We had a butler once,” said the Babe, “who never would say the General Confession, because he said he hadn’t left undone the things he ought to have done, and it went against his conscience to say he had. He got the sack soon after for leaving the door of the cellar undone, and for getting drunk.” “So he was undone himself.”