Perhaps it is because that was the last time I was ever at the Loyalty, but I remember the most irrelevant details and the vivid way each one of them seemed to impress some part of my mind. Guy and I stood in the deserted Bar. Through the open door at the far end came the clean, somehow biting tang of a marble swimming-bath: a faint splash now and then, a rustle of water: a boyish American voice calling sharp and loud: “Dive, you Julie, dive and get it over! You’ve got no hips, kid, and you can’t drown without hips. I want to go eat some food.” Then, I remember, Billy Swift walked intently past us, towards the Cloak-room. He comes to mind vividly because that was the last time I saw Billy Swift alive. His thin, lined, scarlet face glowed with the health-giving breezes that penetrate into corners of clubs and restaurants where men sit drinking brandy; his blue eyes always peered eagerly and kindly at you, as though he had something of the first importance to say. He said, very hoarsely: “There’s a boy up there dancing with two wooden legs. Good boy, I call him. Good night.” And in a minute or two he repassed us, walking intently, his crimson grey-haired head, immaculate in every detail, sticking like an old fighting-bird’s out of the wide astrakhan collar of the coat that he always wore against the midnight chill. Two months later he was found on the cliffs near Dover with that head beaten in, and some one was hanged. Billy Swift wouldn’t have had him hanged. “My fault,” he would have said hoarsely. “My fault, chaps.” “But there it is,” Guy said thoughtfully. “Sickening, isn’t it? Might appeal, of course....” “He’ll not appeal,” I said. Imagine Gerald “appealing” against a five-pound fine for “indecently annoying” a woman in Hyde Park! Guy always spoke low, he murmured in a chill voice, but you could always hear every word he said. Not that you didn’t, after a while, know all his words by heart, for Guy’s was one of those vocabularies that a classical education is supposed to have expanded. As he spoke he would always be looking at some point just above the crown of your head. “Sorry about that boy,” he was saying thoughtfully. “He’s had no luck. And this Hyde Park business might happen to any one nowadays....” He looked down at me suddenly from that height of his, and I was, as always, surprised by the profound childishness which would suddenly sweep the ice out of the blue of those eyes. “Beasts,” he went on, almost pathetically. “But aren’t they--those Park police? Arresting nice old clergymen, Privy Councillors, any one, just because a poor old boy who’s been brought up too well feels like having a word or two with a sickening woman. I mean, you need torpedo-netting around you to get round the Park in safety nowadays. Well, don’t you? And now they plant poor young Gerald. I’m sure, aren’t you, that these police put the women there on purpose as--what d’you call them?” “_Agents provocateurs?_”