And it was no less bold a move than our secession together from the F.B.C. and setting up on our own account that we were to discuss at lunch at the Bull and Bush that day. We walked along a short street with cottages on one side and a high wall on the other, passed under the fairy-lamps of the Bull and Bush arch, and sought one of the little trellised bowers at the edge of the lawn. Waiters always bestirred themselves to attend to Pepper, and the two who approached us at once neglected earlier comers to do so. Pepper gave his order, and we went through the Sunday "ordinary." Then he ordered coffee and liqueurs, bidding the waiter leave the bottle of _crème de menthe_ on the table and not disturb us again. He lighted a cigar; I, not yet a practised smoker, fumbled with a cigarette, at the pasteboard packet of which I saw my ally's glance; and then, spreading a number of papers before him, he plunged into business. It was highly technical, and I will not trouble you with more of it than bore on our immediate secession from the F.B.C.--a step to which I was strongly averse. "You see," Pepper urged presently, "this Campbell Line award precipitates matters rather." (I shook my head, but he went on.) "As a precedent it's going to make an enormous difference. I'll show you the Trinity Master's statement presently.... No, no, wait till I've finished.... It means among other things a revision of the whole Campbell scale, and the other lines will have to follow. Then that'll make trouble with Labour, and Robson and the Board of Trade come in. Here's Robson's letter; better make a note of it. You don't write shorthand, do you?" "N-o." "Hm! You hardly seem quite sure whether you do or not!... Well, I'll get Miss Levey to make an abstract for you. Here's what he says...." And he began to read from the letter. As he did so I was wondering what on earth had made me tell him I didn't write shorthand. I do write shorthand. I keep, as a matter of fact, much of my private journal in shorthand, and I had not the slightest objection to Pepper or anybody else knowing of my accomplishment.... And yet, as if Pepper had somehow taken me off my guard, that doubtful "N-o" had come out. I bit my lip. "Well," he concluded, folding the letter again, "there you have it. Of course I see what you mean about our using the F.B.C. for the present, merely as a going machine; but this seems to me to outweigh that.... You still don't think so?" I still did not. Laboriously, for I never could make a speech in my life, I set my reasons before him. He nodded from time to time, opening and shutting his slender silver pencil. "So you still think wait?" he mused by-and-by. It was evident that I had not spoken in vain. "You can be going ahead with all you want to do as we are, and for the rest I'd wait and see what happened." "Of course there's this war----" he admitted reluctantly. "It's not the war. It's what'll happen after the war."