s heart of hearts, what fun it would
be if they had all been unseated. He grudges the exceptions. For
political bias is one thing; human nature another.

A PARALLEL

The club-room looked very like the auditorium of a music-hall. Indeed,
that is what it must once have been. But now there were tiers of
benches on the stage; and on these was packed a quarter or so of the
members and their friends. The other three-quarters or so were packed
opposite the proscenium and down either side of the hall. And in the
middle of this human oblong was a raised platform, roped around.
Therefrom, just as I was ushered to my place, a stout man in evening
dress was making some announcement. I did not catch its import; but it
was loudly applauded. The stout man--most of the audience indeed,
seemed to have put on flesh--bowed himself off, and disappeared from my
ken in the clouds of tobacco-smoke that hung about the hall. Almost
immediately, two young people, nimbly insinuating themselves through
the rope fence, leapt upon the platform. One was a man of about twenty
years of age; the other, a girl of about seventeen. She was very
pretty; he was very handsome; both were becomingly dressed, with
evident aim at attractiveness. They proceeded to opposite corners of
the platform. At a signal from some one, they advanced to the middle;
and each made a hideous grimace at the other. The grimace, strange in
itself, was stranger still in the light of what followed. For the young
man began to make passionate protestations of love, to which the girl
responded with equal ardour. The young man fell to his knees; the girl
raised him, and clung to his breast. His language became more and more
lyrical, his eyes more and more ecstatic. Suddenly in the middle of a
pretty sentence, wherein his love was likened to a flight of doves, a
bell rang; whereat, not less abruptly, the couple separated, retiring
to the aforesaid corners of the platform and sinking back on their
chairs with every manifestation of fatigue. Their friends or
attendants, however, rallied round them, counselling them, cooling them
with fans, heartening them to fresh endeavour; and when, at the end of
a minute, the signal was sounded for a second tryst, the two young
people seemed fresher and more eager than ever. This time, most of the
love-making was done by the girl; the young man joyously drinking in
her words, and now and then interpolating a few of his own. There were
four trysts in