'It isn't an army exam.; it's at Cambridge; and the rhymes are all the chief tips done into poetry--like "Paley" rhymes, y' know. Paley rhymes give you, for instance, all the miracles or all the parables right off in about four lines of gibberish, and you learn the gibberish and then you're all right. I got through my Little-go that way, but I couldn't the General. Fact is, my coach gave me too _many_ rhymes!' 'And couldn't you recollect the--the tips without rhymes?' 'Couldn't remember _with_ 'em,' he said. 'I could have corked down the verses all right enough, but the beggars won't take them. I forgot what they were all about, so I had to show up blank papers. And I'd stayed up all one Long too!' 'Working?' asked Mabel, with some sympathy. 'Well--and cricketing,' he said ingenuously. 'I call it a swindle.' 'He talks quite a dialect of his own,' thought Mabel surprised. 'Vincent didn't. I wonder if Mr. Ashburn can.' Mr. Ashburn, after a short period of enforced silence spent in uncharitable feelings respecting fair-haired Mr. Pidgely, had been suddenly attacked by the lady on his left, a plump lady with queer comic inflections in her voice, the least touch of brogue, and a reputation for daring originality. 'I suppose now,' she began, 'ye've read the new book they're talking so much about--this "Illusion"? And h'wat's your private opinion? I wonder if I'll find a man with the courage to agree with me, for _I_ said when I'd come to the last page, "Well, they may say what they like, but I never read such weary rubbish in all me life," and I never did!' Mark laughed--he could not help it--but it was a laugh of real enjoyment, without the slightest trace of pique or wounded vanity in it. 'I'll make a confession,' he said. 'I do think myself that the book has been luckier than it deserves--only, as the--the man who wrote it is a--a very old friend of mine--you see, I mustn't join in abusing it.' Mabel heard this and liked Mark the better for it. 'I suppose he couldn't do anything else very well without making a scene,' she thought, 'but he did it very nicely. I hope that woman will find out who he is though; it will be a lesson to her!' Here Mabel was not quite fair, perhaps, for the lady had a right to her opinion, and anything is better than humbug. But she was very needlessly pitying Mark for having to listen to such unpalatable candour, little dreaming how welcome it was to him, or how grateful he felt to his critic. When Mark was free again, after an animated discussion with his candid neighbour, in which each had amused the other and both were on the way to becoming intimate, he found the spoony youth finishing the description of a new figure he had seen in a _cotillon_. 'You all sit down on chairs, don't you know,' he was saying, 'and then the rest come through doors;' and Mabel said, with a spice of malice (for she was being excessively bored), that that must be very pretty and original.