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here," continued Appleby, without a tremor of embarrassment. "Who's for whisky?" "Look here, young Apple-pip, or whatever your name is, what you've got to understand is that...." Appleby again interrupted Lonsdale. "Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?" "What you require, young Appleby," began Lonsdale. "You've got it right this time," said Appleby encouragingly. "What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down." "Oh, really?" said Appleby, with a suave assumption of interest. "Yes," answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for their more eloquent support. "Tell him he mustn't come into Venner's and put on all that side. It's not done. He's a fresher," gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that absorbing chair. "All right," agreed Appleby cheerfully. "I'll send the order up to you next time." Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby's whisky and smoking one of Appleby's cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his resentment to flame, and he sprang up. "We ought to debag him!" he cried. Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open. "Hopeless," sighed Lonsdale. "The man's a hopeless ass." "I think he had the laugh, though," said Michael. CHAPTER VIII THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary's with that scrupulousness of outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning after the attempted adjustment of Appleby's behavior, a raw and vaporous November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o'clock ran collarless, unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at whose head stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry matutinal app
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