"You must have gone about with your eyes shut," Dennison declared.
"Don't sit there talking rot," I said. "If anything ever pleases you, tell us what it is."
"My greatest pleasure is in polite conversation," he answered.
"Oh, you are a sarcastic idiot," I retorted, for people who are afflicted by thinking themselves funny when I think they are idiotic always make me rude.
"Dennison never says what he means," Ward explained, "it is a little habit of his."
"Why can't you talk straight, it's much simpler, and doesn't make me feel so horribly uncomfortable?" I asked, turning to Dennison.
"Marten is getting angry," was the only answer I received, and it was so near the truth that I wanted to pick him up and drop him in the passage.
Ward, however, calmed my feelings by saying that he could not imagine any one troubling to be angry with Dennison. "The one thing he prides himself on is getting a rise out of people, and we aren't such fools as he thinks us."
"And he is a much bigger fool than he thinks," Collier said solemnly.
"You are a nice complimentary lot," Dennison remarked, smiling amiably upon us.