f vulgar furniture.

Whether the gentlemen were agreeable to each other was less evident.
Mr. Grandcourt had drawn his chair aside so as to face the lawn, and
with his left leg over another chair, and his right elbow on the table,
was smoking a large cigar, while his companion was still eating. The
dogs--half-a-dozen of various kinds were moving lazily in and out,
taking attitudes of brief attention--gave a vacillating preference
first to one gentleman, then to the other; being dogs in such good
circumstances that they could play at hunger, and liked to be served
with delicacies which they declined to put in their mouths; all except
Fetch, the beautiful liver-colored water-spaniel, which sat with its
forepaws firmly planted and its expressive brown face turned upward,
watching Grandcourt with unshaken constancy. He held in his lap a tiny
Maltese dog with a tiny silver collar and bell, and when he had a hand
unused by cigar or coffee-cup, it rested on this small parcel of animal
warmth. I fear that Fetch was jealous, and wounded that her master gave
her no word or look; at last it seemed that she could bear this neglect
no longer, and she gently put her large silky paw on her master's leg.
Grandcourt looked at her with unchanged face for half a minute, and
then took the trouble to lay down his cigar while he lifted the
unimpassioned Fluff close to his chin and gave it caressing pats, all
the while gravely watching Fetch, who, poor thing, whimpered
interruptedly, as if trying to repress that sign of discontent, and at
last rested her head beside the appealing paw, looking up with piteous
beseeching. So, at least, a lover of dogs must have interpreted Fetch,
and Grandcourt kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them; at
any rate, his impulse to act just in that way started from such an
interpretation. But when the amusing anguish burst forth in a howling
bark, Grandcourt pushed Fetch down without speaking, and, depositing
Fluff carelessly on the table (where his black nose predominated over a
salt-cellar), began to look to his cigar, and found, with some
annoyance against Fetch as the cause, that the brute of a cigar
required relighting. Fetch, having begun to wail, found, like others of
her sex, that it was not easy to leave off; indeed, the second howl was
a louder one, and the third was like unto it.

"Turn out that brute, will you?" said Grandcourt to Lush, without
raising his voice or looking at him--as if he