‘Oh, that wretched island!’ cried Beatrice. ‘You’re really going?’
‘Most undoubtedly. By the way, Hamlyn, who’s your friend?’
Surely this was an innocent enough question, but little Hamlyn went red from the edge of his clipped whisker on the right to the edge of his mathematically equal whisker on the left.
‘Friend!’ said he in an angry tone; ‘he’s not a friend of mine. I only met him on the Riviera.’
‘That,’ I admitted, ‘does not, happily, in itself constitute a friendship.’
‘And he won a hundred louis of me in the train between Cannes and Monte Carlo.’
‘Not bad going that,’ observed Denny in an approving tone.
‘Is he then un grec?’ asked Mrs Hipgrave, who loves a scrap of French.
‘In both senses, I believe,’ answered Hamlyn viciously.