"What have you been living on?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "immature potatoes and Burgundy" (I give the catalogue so precisely because it has nothing to do with the story), "uncooked steak and limp lettuces, precocious carrots and Bartlett pears, and thirteen varieties of fluid beef, which I cannot name except at the usual advertisement rates."
"But can you sleep after it?" said I.
"Blimy! yes," he replied; "I'm fairly—what is it?—eupeptic."
"It's all over with mankind," I muttered.
"It is all over," he replied. "The Wenuses 'ave only lost one Crinoline, just one, and they keep on coming; they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to be done. We're beat!"
I made no answer. I sat staring, pulverised by the colossal intellectuality of this untutored private. He had attended only three of my lectures, and had never taken any notes.
"This isn't a war," he resumed; "it never was a war. These 'ere Wenuses they wants to be Mas, that's the long and the short of it. Only——"
"Yes?" I said, more than ever impressed by the man's pyramidal intuition.
"They can't stand the climate. They're too—what is it?—exotic."