Talking of dances, one’s getting a bit degoutee of Jazz bands and steps.  When ces autres get hold of anything it always begins to leave off being amusing.  There’s really a new step, however, the Peace Leap, that hasn’t yet been quite use and spoilt by the outlying tribes.  The origin of it was a little funny.  Chippy Havilland was at one of Kickshaw’s Jazz dinners one night, where people fly out of their seats to one-step and two-step between the courses and during the courses and all the time.  Well, while Chippy was eating his fish the band struck up that catchy Jazz-stagger, “She’s corns on her toes,” and Chippy, his mouth full of fish, jumped up and began to dance. Of course several fish-bones flew down his throat, and while he was choking he did such fearful and wonderful things that the whole room, not dreaming the poor dear was at his dernier soupir, broke out clapping and shouting and then imitated him, and by the time Chippy felt better he found himself famous and everybody doing the Peace Leap, which has completely cut out the Jazz-stagger, the Wolf’s Prowl and everything else.

Oh, my dearest, who do you think are among the crowd of married people who’re going to celebrate peace by dissolving partnership?  The Algy Mallowdenes!  Our prize couple!  The flitchiest of Dunmow Flitch pairs!  The turtlest of turtle—­doves!  Whenever people spoke of marriage as played out other people always weighed in with, “Well, but look at the Algy Mallowdenes.”

They married on war-bread and Government cheese and kisses (unrationed).  Seriously, though, m’amie, I believe they’d scarcely anything beyond his two thousand pounds a year as Permanent Irremovable Assistant Under-Secretary at the No-Use-Coming-Here Office.  Certainly an “official residence” and a staff of servants were allowed ’em, but when poor Lallie asked to have a ball-room built, and Algy said he simply must have a billiard-room and smoke-room added, one of those fearful red-flag creatures got up in the House just as the money was going to be voted and made such an uproar that the matter was dropped.

And then, having heaps of spare time at the No-Use-Coming-Here Office, Algy began to write novels and found himself at once.  You’ve read some of them, of course?  Life with a big L, my dear.  Every kind of world while you wait, the upper, the under, and the half.  Lallie was very glad of the money that came rolling in, but I believe she said wistfully, “How does my gentle quiet Algy know so much about this, that and the other?” And her gentle quiet Algy made answer:  “Intuition, dear; imagination; the novelist’s temperament.”

By-and-by, however, she began to hear of his being seen at the Umpty Club and Gaston’s, chatting with Pearl Preston (one of those people, you know, Daphne, who’re immensely talked about but never mentioned).  And then a “certain liveliness” set in at the official residence of the Permanent Irremovable Assistant Under-Secretary.