e was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own
land, but was otherwise quite steady. Should never have suspected him of
having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's
widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf;
dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player,
but still, it showed imagination. His wife was really to be pitied,
because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to
manage the cook's temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner
invitations. Still, that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who
leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.

I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they seldom have more
than a superficial acquaintance with their guests, and so often just when
they do get to know you a bit better, they leave off knowing you
altogether. There was _rather_ a breath of winter in the air when I left
those Dorsetshire people. You see, they had asked me down to shoot, and
I'm not particularly immense at that sort of thing. There's such a
deadly sameness about partridges; when you've missed one, you've missed
the lot--at least, that's been my experience. And they tried to rag me
in the smoking-room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a
sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and
thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early
dawn--I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and
the grass looked as if it had been left out all night--and hunted up the
most conspicuous thing in the bird line that I could find, and measured
the distance, as nearly as it would let me, and shot away all I knew.
They said afterwards that it was a tame bird; that's simply _silly_,
because it was awfully wild at the first few shots. Afterwards it
quieted down a bit, and when its legs had stopped waving farewells to the
landscape I got a gardener-boy to drag it into the hall, where everybody
must see it on their way to the breakfast-room. I breakfasted upstairs
myself. I gathered afterwards that the meal was tinged with a very
unchristian spirit. I suppose it's unlucky to bring peacock's feathers
into a house; anyway, there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess's eye
when I took my departure.

Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even unto pavonicide
(is there such a wo