According to Dare, Carruthers is sometimes hopelessly English, not in his ideas; but in his method of expressing them—his ideas themselves are Continental. Dare told him that by saying Millie Standish's husband, instead of Standish, he implied that he, Dare, was in love with another man's wife.
Carruthers had blurted out that of course he was, everybody knew it.
Dare pointed out that he had got mixed in his tenses. To be in love with a married woman is apt to compromise her: to have been in love with her, merely adds to her interest and importance in the eyes of her contemporaries.
That is Dare all over. He would stop his own funeral service to point a moral, or launch an epigram.
Standish and Dare had been close friends until Standish fell insanely in love with the young woman who dispensed "tonics" in the saloon-bar of "The Belted Earl." Standish was a bizarre creature at times, and, to use Dare's own words, "what must the braying jackass do but endeavour to cultivate Fay's (that was his inamorata's classic name) mind, which existed nowhere outside the radius of his own mystical imagination."
On her nights out he took her to ballad concerts, when her soul yearned for the Pictures; and to University extension lectures, when her whole being craved for the Oxford.
When she complained of the long hours and the "sinking" she felt between meals, he advised her to eat raisins, and descanted sagely upon the sustaining properties of sugar. No one will ever know how he got acquainted with her, for drink made him either sick or silly. However, every evening between six and seven Standish ran into "The Belted Earl" on his way home, consumed a small lemonade, and handed Fay her morrow's ration of raisins.
He confided the whole story to Dare, he was bursting with it. Dare gave him sage counsel built up upon the foundation of secrecy, but instinctively he knew that it was impossible with a man like Standish.
One night Standish insisted upon Dare accompanying him into the saloon-bar of "The Belted Earl" where he was formally introduced to what Dare described as "a big-busted creature, with a head like a blonde horse and teeth suggestive of a dentist's show-case."
Fay's conversation seemed to consist mainly of three phrases, which are given in the order of the frequency with which they escaped her