Warrender began the narrative as he towelled himself, continued it through his dressing, and concluded it when he had dropped into his chair by Pratt's side. Pratt listened with ever-growing merriment.
"You priceless old fatheads!" he exclaimed. "When the beggar chucked Latin at you why didn't you pelt him with Greek, Phil?--or with sines and hypotenuses, and all that, Jack? Don't you remember how some Cambridge josser floored a heathen bargee by calling him an isosceles triangle? I wish I'd gone."
"I wish you had!" echoed Warrender. "But when a fellow's so dashed polite----"
"Polite! I tell you what it is: you're both too serious for this flighty world. When you consider that it's gyrating at the rate of I don't know how many thousand miles a minute, it's unnatural, positively indecent, for any one to be so stuggy. The art of life is to effervesce. But, you know, the important feature of your morning's entertainment seems not to have sufficiently impressed you."
"What's that?" asked Armstrong.
"Rod's wife. Cherchez la femme! You oughtn't to have come away without having had a word with her."
"How on earth could we?" said Warrender. "We weren't asked into the house, and if we had been----"
"My dear chap, if a fair lady beckoned to me out of her casement window I'd find some means of receiving her behests. Rod's wife, née Molly Rogers, didn't make signs to you for nothing, and I foresee that I shall have to turn our skipping-rope into a rope ladder, and----"
"Oh, don't go on gassing," Armstrong interposed, irascibly. "Can't you be serious?"
"Solemnity itself. We've got to fetch that dinghy. I want to go to the post office. Very well, after lunch Phil shall run me up in the motorboat. I'll have a word with Rogers on the way, and I bet my boots I won't come back without some little addition to our dossier."