"You've got to find something to do up first," said I. "This isn't
Paris."
A colour was lent to my foreboding within the hour.
As we sat down to luncheon—
"Yes," said Berry, "my vixen and I have spent a delightful morning.
We've been through fourteen shops and bought two amethyst necklets and
a pot of marmalade. I subsequently dropped the latter in the Place
Royale, so we're actually twelve down."
"Whereabouts in the Place Royale?" I inquired.
"Just outside the Club. Everybody I knew was either going in or coming out, so it went very well indeed."
There was a gust of laughter.
"N-not on the pavement?" whimpered Jill.
"On the pavement," said Daphne. "It was dreadful. I never was so ashamed. Of course I begged him to pick it up before it ran out. D'you think he'd do it? Not he. Said it was written, and it was no good fighting against Fate, and that he'd rather wash his hands of it than after it, and that sort of stuff. Then Nobby began to lick it up…. But for Fitch, I think we should have been arrested. Mercifully, we'd told him to wait for us by the bandstand, and he saw the whole thing."
"It's all very fine," said her husband. "It was I who furnished and suggested the use of the current issue of Le Temps, and, without that, Fitch couldn't have moved. As it was, one sheet made a shroud, another a pall, and Nobby's beard and paws were appropriately wiped upon the ever-burning scandal of 'Reparations.'"