hip of Constance
Broddle. You see, when I sold the brooch I quite properly refused to
give her any share of the proceeds. I pointed out that the Esme part
of the affair was my own invention, and the hyaena part of it belonged
to Lord Pabham, if it really was his hyaena, of which, of course, I've
no proof."

THE MATCH-MAKER

The grill-room clock struck eleven with the respectful unobtrusiveness
of one whose mission in life is to be ignored. When the flight of time
should really have rendered abstinence and migration imperative the
lighting apparatus would signal the fact in the usual way.

Six minutes later Clovis approached the supper-table, in the blessed
expectancy of one who has dined sketchily and long ago.

"I'm starving," he announced, making an effort to sit down gracefully
and read the menu at the same time.

"So I gathered;" said his host, "from the fact that you were nearly
punctual. I ought to have told you that I'm a Food Reformer. I've
ordered two bowls of bread-and-milk and some health biscuits. I hope
you don't mind."

Clovis pretended afterwards that he didn't go white above the
collar-line for the fraction of a second.

"All the same," he said, "you ought not to joke about such things.
There really are such people. I've known people who've met them. To
think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and
then to go through life munching sawdust and being proud of it."

"They're like the Flagellants of the Middle Ages, who went about
mortifying themselves."

"They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their
immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who
doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a
stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly
developed."

Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into tender intimacies with a
succession of rapidly disappearing oysters.

"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed
presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify
it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they
arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the
spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that
quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like
my new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for the first time to-night."

"It looks like a great many others