“Not a bit of it. It was only for your sake I suggested it. Smoke.” The Babe was limping about the room and came upon a set of chessmen. “I want to play chess,” he said. “Chess is the most delightful game if you treat it as a game of pure chance. You ought to move your queen into the middle of the board and then see what happens. To reduce it to the level of a sum in advanced mathematics, is a scandal and an outrage. To calculate the effect of a move takes away all the excitement.” “You may always calculate it wrong.” “In that case it becomes a nuisance. Reggie, will you play?” “No.” “Ealing?” “I can’t. I don’t know the moves.” “Nor do I. We should be about equal. Supposing you set two Heathen Chinese to play chess, which would win?” “Is it a riddle?” The Babe sank down again in his chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “If it is, I give up. By the way what are you two chaps doing to-morrow?” “Stop in bed till ten,” said Reggie, “it being the Day of Rest: Chapel. Breakfast. Lunch. Pitt. Tea. Pitt. Sunday Club.” “Do you belong to that? I thought it was semi-clerical.” “Yes, we are all lay readers.” “I went once,” said the Babe. “We ate what is described as a cold collation. Then we all sat round, and somebody made jokes and we all laughed. I made jokes too, but nobody sat round me. There was a delightful, decorous gaiety about the proceedings. I think we sang hymns afterwards, or else we looked at photographs of cathedrals, I forget which. Hymns and photographs are so much alike.” “O Lord, what do you mean?” asked Reggie. “They are both like Sunday evening, and things which are like the same thing are like one another. At eleven we parted.” “The wicked old Babe doesn’t care for simple pleasures,” said Ealing. “Oh, he knows a thing or two.” “It’s always absurd for a lot of people to meet like that,” continued the Babe. “The whole point of dining clubs ought to be to have a lot of members with utterly different tastes. Then you see they can’t all talk about their tastes, they can’t all sit round and do one thing, and consequently they all talk rot, which is the only rational form of conversation. If there is one thing I detest more than another it is cliques. Individually I love most of the members of the Sunday Club, collectively I cannot even like them. And the same thing applies to the Athenæum.” “Then why do you belong?” “In order to go to Chapel in a pink and white tie, and also because I love the members individually. I must go. Where’s Bill? Come along under my ulster. Good-bye, you people.” V.--THE WORK-CLUB. For men must work. KINGSLEY.