"Oh, you're the plainest, are you? What on earth are they like?"
"They're quite good-looking, and they're awfully chic. But that's in parentheses. What I mean is that they're always hectoring me because I'm not attractive—"
"Really?"
"I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm too busy and too angry for that. I want to go on talking about what we're talking about."
"But I want to know why they said you were unattractive."
"Well, perhaps they didn't say it. What they have said is this, and it's what Mrs. Rossiter says—she said it to-day—that I'm only attractive to one man in five hundred—"
"But very attractive to him?"
"No; she didn't say that. She merely admitted that her brother Hugh was that man—"
He interrupted with something I wished at the time he hadn't said, and which I tried to ignore:
"He's the man in that five hundred—and I know another in another five hundred, which makes two in a thousand. You'd soon get up to a high percentage, when you think of all the men there are in the world."