Coleman patted his curly head. “Delicious child!” he said. “You’re positively Hogarthian.”
Angrily, the boy pushed him away. “What are you doing?” he shouted; then turned and addressed himself once more to the others. “I couldn’t afford it, you know—not a bloody penny of it. Not my money, either.” He seemed to find it exquisitely humorous. “And that two hundred wasn’t all,” he added, almost expiring with mirth.
“Tell Coleman how you borrowed his beard, Theodore.”
Gumbril was looking intently into his glass, as though he hoped to see in its pale mixture of gin and Sauterne visions, as in a crystal, of the future. Mrs. Viveash touched him on the arm and repeated her injunction.
“Oh, that!” said Gumbril rather irritably. “No. It isn’t an interesting story.”
“Oh yes, it is! I insist,” said Mrs. Viveash, commanding peremptorily from her death-bed.
Gumbril drank his gin and Sauterne. “Very well then,” he said reluctantly, and began.
“I don’t know what my governor will say,” the young man put in once or twice. But nobody paid any attention to him. He relapsed into a sulky and, it seemed to him, very dignified silence. Under the warm, jolly tipsiness he felt a chill of foreboding. He poured out some more whisky.
Gumbril warmed to his anecdote. Expiringly Mrs. Viveash laughed from time to time, or smiled her agonizing smile. Coleman whooped like a Redskin.
“And after the concert to these rooms,” said Gumbril.