He glanced swiftly at me in his bird-like fashion, his brow creased into a thousand tiny horizontal lines—­it always took him a fraction of a second to get clear of the literal significance of words—­and then he laughed.  Personal violence was out of the question.  Why, the young beggar might summon him for assault.  No; he had a better idea.  He would put in a word at the proper quarter, so that every recruiting sergeant in the district should have orders to stop him at every opportunity.

“I shouldn’t do that,” said I.

“Then, I don’t know what the deuce I can do,” said Sir Anthony.

As I didn’t know, either, our colloquy was fruitless.  Eventually Sir Anthony said: 

“Perhaps it’s likely, after all, that Gedge may offend young Oxford’s fastidiousness.  It can’t be long before he discovers Gedge to be nothing but a vulgar, blatant wind-bag; and then he may undergo some reaction.”

I agreed.  It seemed to be the most sensible thing he had said.  Give Gedge enough rope and he would hang himself.  So we parted.

I have said before that when I want to shew how independent I am of everybody I drive abroad in my donkey carriage.  But there are times when I have to be dependent on Marigold for carrying me into the houses I enter; on these helpless occasions I am driven about by Marigold in a little two-seater car.  That is how I visited Wellings Park and that is how I set off a day or two later to call on Mrs. Boyce.

As she took little interest in anything foreign to her own inside, she was not to most people an exhilarating companion.  She even discussed the war in terms of her digestion.  But we were old friends.  Being a bit of a practical philosopher I could always derive some entertainment from her serial romance of a Gastric Juice, and besides, she was the only person in Wellingsford whom I did not shrink from boring with the song of my own ailments.  Rather than worry the Fenimores or Betty or Mrs. Holmes with my aches and pains I would have hung on, like the idiot boy of Sparta with the fox, until my vitals were gnawed out—­parenthetically, it has always worried me to conjecture why a boy should steal a fox, why it should have been so valuable to the owner, and to what use he put it.  In the case of all my other friends I regarded myself as too much of an obvious nuisance, as it was, for me to work on their sympathy for infirmities that I could hide; but with Mrs. Boyce it was different.  The more I chanted antistrophe to her strophe of lamentation the more was I welcome in her drawing-room.  I had not seen her for some weeks.  Perhaps I had been feeling remarkably well with nothing in the world to complain about, and therefore unequipped with a topic of conversation.  However, hearty or not, it was time for me to pay her a visit.  So I ordered the car.

Mrs. Boyce lived in a comfortable old house half a mile or so beyond the other end of the town, standing in half a dozen well-wooded acres.  It was a fair April afternoon, all pale sunshine and tenderness.  A dream of fairy green and delicate pink and shy blue sky melting into pearl.  The air smelt sweet.  It was good to be in it, among the trees and the flowers and the birds.