"Perhaps he wants to get away from his wife," hinted a pigeon of Jim's plucking. "Bit of a tongue, hasn't she?"
"Tongue be hanged! She has both wit and beauty."
The pigeon sniggered, knowing the speaker's devotion to Delilah. "Oh, Kaimes appreciates those qualities--in another man's wife."
"Scandal! Scandal!" murmured a meek member, blessed with a spouse whose looks prevented temptation. "Kaimes has dined with us many times, but I never saw----"
"No; you wouldn't," struck in a sporting baronet, whom Leah snubbed on every possible occasion. "Jim likes red-haired women."
"Then why doesn't he stick to the one he's legally entitled to?"
"Because she sticks to him. If she'd only syndicate her admirers in the D. C., Jim 'ud be after her like an Indian mosquito in search of a new arrival. I'll bet there's some petticoat in this Jamaica business;" and the sportsman looked round for some one to pander to his besetting sin--but no one gave him a chance of committing it.
Contradiction and argument arrived with the oldest inhabitant of Clubland, whose memory was as exasperating as his verbosity. "Wrong! All wrong," he purred, like the tame cat he had been for half a century. "Kaimes is really consumptive. I remember his grandmother dying of tuberculosis. It's in the family, along with gout and water on the brain."
"Oh, bosh! If Jim was sick, he'd sin more judiciously."
"I never knew that damnation depended upon health," was the retort. "Take a case in point. During the Great Exhibition----"