I lay panting and exhausted on the bed, feeling as one does after a long afternoon spent with a garrulous and deaf old lady. Finally the wretch came back to me, fiddled with the books at my side, criticised them all, gave me a list of those he had read during the past forty years, and then got as far as the door.
“Now keep quiet,” he remarked, looking down his nose at me with a judicial air, “don’t have people in here chattering.”
Ill as I was, I could not take this lying down. I sat up and croaked, “What about you?”
“Oh, I’ll come round to-morrow morning,” he replied, unscathed by my sarcasm.
When James came home I said I was a little better and would get up. “What did you think of Smithson?” he asked. “I am told he is a clever chap.”
“He’s a first-rate musician,” I said.
“What?”
“And Alpine climber.”
“How the deuce do you know?” asked James.
“He has been up the Markhorn, the Rotterham, the Bungleberg, the Sloshwald, all over Borenpest range; then in Wales, the Greater and smaller Bosh, the Gwaddear, the——”