There he lay: bathed, shaved, and wrapped in an old padded dressing-jacket of the Doña’s (sky-blue, embroidered in pink flowers), which he had surreptitiously rescued from a jumble sale, against his own colds.
At the foot of the bed snored ’Snice, at his elbow stood a siphon and a long glass into which four or five oranges had been squeezed, and before him lay a delicious day—no Church (“I say, Dick! That’s the treat that never palls!” Hugh Mallam used to say), an excellent luncheon brought up on a tray, then a sleep, then tea, then, say, a game of Bézique with little Anna ... but the best thing of all that awaited him was a romance of the Secret Service.
He put on his eyeglasses and glanced through the headings of the chapters: Mr. ?; A Little Dinner at the Savoy; The Freckled Gentleman Takes a Hand; Double Bluff.
Yes; it promised well. It was always a good sign if the chapters took their headings from the language of Poker.
With a little sigh of content he began to read. Had he but known it, it was a most suitable exercise for a Sunday morning; for, in the true sense of the word, it was a profoundly religious book.
On and on he read.
The bedroom, unused to denizens at midday, seemed, in its exquisite orderliness, frozen into a sedate reserve. The tide of life had left it very clean and glistening and still: not a breath rustled the pink cretonne curtains; the autumn roses in a bowl on the dressing-table might have been made of alabaster; the ornaments on the mantelpiece stood shoulder to shoulder without a smile at their own incongruity—a small plaster cast of Montañes’ Jesùs del Gran Poder beside a green china pig with a slit in its back, which had once held the savings of the little Lanes; with an equal lack of self-consciousness, an enlarged photograph of Arnold straddling in the pads of a wicket-keeper hung on the wall beside an engraving in which the Virgin, poised in mid-air, was squeezing from her breast a stream of luminous milk into the mouth of a kneeling monk; and everywhere—from among the scent-bottles on the dressing-table, beside a chromograph of Cadiz on the wall—everywhere smiled the lovely face of Pepa.
’Snice stirred at his feet, and, laying down his book, Dick dragged his smooth, brown, unresisting length to the top of the bed.
A member of his Club, who was an eminent physician was always talking about the importance of “relaxing.” “Pity he can’t see ’Snice,” thought Dick, as he lifted one of the limp paws, then, letting go, watched it heavily flop down on to the counterpane. “’Snice! ’Snice!” he repeated to himself; and then began to chuckle, as, for the thousandth time, he realised the humour of the name.
“’Snice,” meaning “it’s nice,” had been the catch-word at the Pantomime one year; and Arnold or Concha or some one had decided that that was what Fritz, as he was then called, was constantly trying to say; so, in time, ’Snice had become his name.