after drinking two cocktails than at any other
time--quicker, kindlier, more genial. And higher, morally. I had been
telling stories in that inimitable way that one has after two cocktails.
In reality, I only know four stories, and a fifth that I don't quite
remember, but in moments of expansiveness they feel like a fund or flow.

It was under such circumstances that I sat with Beverly-Jones. And it
was in shaking hands at leaving that he said: "I _do_ wish, old chap,
that you could run up to our summer place and give us the whole of
August!" and I answered, as I shook him warmly by the hand: "My _dear_
fellow, I'd simply _love_ to!" "By gad, then it's a go!" he said. "You
must come up for August, and wake us all up!"

Wake them up! Ye gods! Me wake them up!

One hour later I was repenting of my folly, and wishing, when I thought
of the two cocktails, that the prohibition wave could be hurried up so
as to leave us all high and dry--bone-dry, silent and unsociable.

Then I clung to the hope that Beverly-Jones would forget. But no. In due
time his wife wrote to me. They were looking forward so much, she said,
to my visit; they felt--she repeated her husband's ominous phrase--that
I should wake them all up!

What sort of alarm-clock did they take me for, anyway!

Ah, well! They know better now. It was only yesterday afternoon that
Beverly-Jones found me standing here in the gloom of some cedar-trees
beside the edge of the pond and took me back so quietly to the house
that I realized he thought I meant to drown myself. So I did.

I could have stood it better--my coming here, I mean--if they hadn't
come down to the station in a body to meet me in one of those long
vehicles with seats down the sides: silly-looking men in coloured
blazers and girls with no hats, all making a hullabaloo of welcome. "We
are quite a small party," Mrs. Beverly-Jones had written. Small! Great
heavens, what would they call a large one? And even those at the station
turned out to be only half of them. There were just as many more all
lined up on the piazza of the house as we drove up, all waving a fool
welcome with tennis rackets and golf clubs.

Small party, indeed! Why, after six days there are still some of the
idiots whose names I haven't got straight! That fool with the fluffy
moustache, which is he? And that jackass that made the salad at the
picnic yesterday, is he the brother of the woman with the guitar, or
who?

But what I mean is