Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby’s whisky and smoking one of Appleby’s cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his resentment to flame, and he sprang up.
“We ought to debag him!” he cried.
Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.
“Hopeless,” sighed Lonsdale. “The man’s a hopeless ass.”
“I think he had the laugh, though,” said Michael.
CHAPTER VIII
THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS
Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary’s with that scrupulousness of outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning after the attempted adjustment of Appleby’s behavior, a raw and vaporous November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o’clock ran collarless, unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at whose head stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry matutinal appearances. Michael waited long enough to see his name fairly entered in the book, yawned resentfully at the Dean, and started back on the taciturn journey that must culminate in the completion of his toilet. Crossing the gravel space between Cloisters and Cuther’s worldly quad, he met Maurice Avery dressed finally for the day at one minute past eight o’clock. Such a phenomenon provoked him into speech.
“What on earth.... Are you going to London?” he gasped.
“Rather not. I’m going out to buy a copy of the O.L.G.”