teristic of Peter that, even while he listened
to this embarrassing remark, he was free enough from self-consciousness
to be thinking with a keen though undefined pleasure how extraordinarily
nice to look at both Hilary and Urquhart, in their different ways, were.
(Peter's love of the beautiful matured with his growth, but in intensity
it could scarcely grow.) Urquhart was saying something about bad luck and
shoulders; it was decent of Urquhart to say that. In fact, things were
going really well till Hilary, after saying, "Good-bye, glad to have met
you," added to it the afterthought, "You must come and stay at my uncle's
place in Sussex some time. Mustn't he, Peter?" At the same time--fitting
accompaniment to the over-bold words--Peter saw a half-crown, a round,
solid, terrible _half-crown_, pressed into Urquhart's unsuspecting hand.
Oh, horror! Which was the worse, the invitation or the half-crown? Peter
could never determine. Which was the more flagrant indecency--that he,
young Margerison of the lower fourth, should, without any encouragement
whatever, have asked Urquhart of the sixth, captain of the fifteen, head
of his house, to come and stay with him; or that his near relative should
have pressed half-a-crown into the great Urquhart's hand as if he
expected him to go forthwith to the tuck-shop at the corner and buy
tarts? Peter wriggled, scarlet from his collar to his hair.

Urquhart was a polite person. He took the half-crown. He murmured
something about being very glad. He even smiled his pleasant smile. And
Peter, entirely unexpectedly to himself, did what he always did in the
crises of his singularly disastrous life--he exploded into a giggle. So,
some years later, he laughed helplessly and suddenly, standing among the
broken fragments of his social reputation and his professional career. He
could not help it. When the worst had happened, there was nothing else
one could do. One laughed from a sheer sense of the completeness of the
disaster. Peter had a funny, extremely amused laugh; hardly the laugh of
a prosperous person; rather that of the unhorsed knight who acknowledges
the utterness of his defeat and finds humour in the very fact. It was as
if misfortune--and this misfortune of the half-crown and the invitation
is not to be under-estimated--sharpened all the faculties, never blunt,
by which he apprehended humour. So he looked from Hilary to Urquhart,
and, mentally, from both to his cowering self, and expl