"What about John?"
At this moment there whirred past, bearing in its interior a weedy, snub-nosed man with a waxed moustache, a large red automobile. Hugo, suspending his remarks, followed it with astonished eyes.
"Good Lord!"
"What about Johnnie?"
"That was the Dex-Mayo," said Hugo. "And the gargoyle inside was that blighter Twist from Healthward Ho. Great Scott! The car must have been over there to fetch him."
"What's so remarkable about that?"
"What's so remarkable?" echoed Hugo, astounded. "What's remarkable about Uncle Lester deliberately sending his car twenty miles to fetch a man who could have come, if he had to come at all, by train at his own expense? My dear old thing, it's revolutionary. It marks an epoch. Do you know what I think has happened? You remember that dynamite explosion in the park when Uncle Lester nearly got done in?"
"I don't have much chance to forget it."
"Well, what I believe has happened is that the shock he got that day has completely changed his nature. It's a well-known thing. You hear of such cases all the time. Ronnie Fish was telling me about one only yesterday. There was a man he knew in London, a money lender, a fellow who had a glass eye, and the only thing that enabled anyone to tell which of his eyes was which was that the glass one had rather a more human expression than the other. That's the sort of chap he was. Well, one day he was nearly konked in a railway accident, and he came out of hospital a different man. Slapped people on the back, patted children on the head, tore up I.O.U.'s, and talked about its being everybody's duty to make the world a better place. Take it from me, young Pat, Uncle Lester's whole nature has undergone some sort of rummy change like that. That swallow's nest business must have been a preliminary symptom. Ronnie tells me that this money lender with the glass eye...."
Pat was not interested in glass-eyed money lenders.