enormities of human invention. There were monstrous dogs of China and
Japan; Aztec dogs; dogs in Sevres and Dresden and Chelsea; sixpenny
dogs from Austria and Switzerland; everything in the way of a little
dog that man had made. He stood in front of it with almost a doggish
snarl on his lips. He had spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds over
these futile dogs. Yet never a flesh and blood, real, lusty _canis
futilis_ had he possessed. He used to dislike real dogs. The shivering
rat, Goliath, could scarcely be called a dog. He had wasted his heart
over these contemptible counterfeits. To add to his collection,
catalogue it, describe it, correspond about it with the semi-imbecile
Russian prince, his only rival collector, had once ranked with his
history of wall-papers as the serious and absorbing pursuit of his
life.

Then suddenly Doggie's hatred reached the crisis of ferocity. He saw
red. He seized the first instrument of destruction that came to his
hand, a little gilt Louis XV music stool, and bashed the cabinet full
in front. The glass flew into a thousand splinters. He bashed again.
The woodwork of the cabinet, stoutly resisting, worked hideous damage
on the gilt stool. But Doggie went on bashing till the cabinet sank in
ruins and the little dogs, headless, tailless, rent in twain, strewed
the floor. Then Doggie stamped on them with his heavy munition boots
until dogs and glass were reduced to powder and the Aubusson carpet
was cut to pieces.

"Damn the whole infernal place!" cried Doggie, and he heaved a
mandolin tied up with disgusting peacock-blue ribbons at the bookcase,
and fled from the room.

He stood for a while in the hall, shaken with his anger; then mounted
the staircase and went into his own bedroom with the satinwood
furniture and nattier blue hangings. God! what a bedchamber for a man!
He would have liked to throw bombs into the nest of effeminacy. But
his mother had arranged it, so in a way it was immune from his
iconoclastic rage. He went down to the dining-room, helped himself to
a whisky and soda from the sideboard, and sat down in the arm-chair
amidst the scattered newspapers and held his head in his hands and
thought.

The house was hateful; all its associations were hateful. If he lived
there until he was ninety, the abhorred ghost of the pre-war little
Doggie Trevor would always haunt every nook and cranny of the place,
mouthing the quarter of a century's shame that had culminated in the