istening to me, you
listened to him. What were the consequences?"

"For goodness sake don't moralize. I know well enough what they were.
Ruin. And it doesn't gild the pill to remember that I deserved to
swallow it."

"If only you'd swallowed the advice instead! It would have slipped down
more easily, poor old boy. But you swore to bolt the next dose without a
groan. I said I'd try and think of a better plan than selling your
Panhard, and going out to help work an African farm on the proceeds.
Well, I _have_ thought of a plan, and there you have the proof of my
combined solicitude and ingenuity, in my own paper."

"Don't shoot off big words at me."

"I'm a journalist; my father before me was a journalist, and got his
silly old baronetcy by being a journalist. _I'm_ one still, and have
saved up quite a little competency on big words and potted phrases. I've
collected a great many practical ideas in my experience. I want to make
you a present of some of them, if only you'll have them."

"Do you call this advertisement a practical idea? You can't for a minute
suppose that I'd be found dead carting a lot of American or other women
whom I don't know about Europe in my car, and taking their beastly
money?"

"If you drove properly, you wouldn't be found dead; and you would know
them," I had begun, when there was a ring at the gate bell, and the
high wall of the garden abruptly opened to admit a tidal wave of chiffon
and muslin.

Terry and I were both so taken aback at this unexpected inundation that
for a moment we lay still in our chairs and stared, with our hats tipped
over our eyes and our pipes in our mouths. We were not accustomed to
afternoon calls or any other time-of-day calls from chiffon and muslin
at the Chalet des Pins, therefore our first impression was that the
tidal wave had overflowed through my gate by mistake, and would promptly
retire in disorder at sight of us. But not at all. It swept up the path,
in pink, pale green, and white billows, frothing at the edges with lace.

There was a lot of it--a bewildering lot. It was all train, and big,
flowery hats, and wonderful transparent parasols, which you felt you
ought to see through, and couldn't. Before it was upon us, Terry and I
had sprung up in self-defence, our pipes burning holes in our pockets,
our Panamas in our hands.

Now the inundation divided itself into separate wavelets, the last
lagging behind, crested by a foaming parasol, which hid all