"What do you call a little secret fount of pleasure?" asked Doggie. "I'll give you an illustration--and, if you're the man I consider you to be, you'll take a humorous view of my frankness. At present I adapt myself to a rough atmosphere of coarseness and lustiness, in which nothing coarse or lusty I could do would produce the slightest ripple of a convulsion: but I have my store of a cultivated mind and cheap editions of the classics, my little secret fount of Castaly to drink from whenever I so please. On the other hand, when I had the honour of being responsible for your education, I adapted myself to a hot-house atmosphere in which Respectability and the concomitant virtues of Supineness and Sloth were cultivated like rare orchids; but in my bedroom I kept a secret fount which had its source in some good Scots distillery." Whereupon he attacked his plateful of chicken with vehement gusto. "You're a hedonist, Phineas," said Doggie, after a thoughtful pause. "Man," said Phineas, laying down his knife and fork, "you've just hit it. I am. I'm an accomplished hedonist. An early recognition of the fact saved me from the Church." "And the Church from you," said Doggie quietly. Phineas shot a swift glance at him beneath his shaggy brown eyebrows. "Ay," said he. "Though, mark you, if I had followed my original vocation, the Bench of Bishops could not have surpassed me in the unction in which I would have wallowed. If I had been born a bee in a desert, laddie, I would have sucked honey out of a dead camel." With easy and picturesque cynicism, and in a Glasgow accent which had curiously broadened since his spell of Oriental ease at Denby Hall, he developed his philosophy, illustrating it by incidents more or less reputable in his later career. At first, possessor of the ill-gotten thousand pounds and of considerable savings from a substantial salary, he had enjoyed the short wild riot of the Prodigal's life. Paris saw most of his money--the Paris which, under his auspices, Doggie never knew. Plentiful claret set his tongue wagging in Rabelaisian reminiscence. After Paris came husks. Not bad husks if you knew how to cook them. Borrowed salt and pepper and a little stolen butter worked wonders. But they were irritating to the stomach. He lay on the floor, said he, and yelled for fatted calf; but there was no soft-headed parent to supply it. Phineas McPhail must be a slave again and work for his living. Then came private coaching, freelance journalism, hunting for secretaryships: the commonplace story humorously told of the wastrel's decline; then a gorgeous efflorescence in light green and gold as the man outside a picture palace in Camberwell--and lastly, the penniless patriot throwing himself into the arms of his desirous country. "Have you any whisky in the house, laddie?" he asked, after the dinner things had been taken away. "No," said Doggie, "but I could easily get you some."