"How very charming of you, Jimmy!" said Madame Eulalie.
George Finch's face worked convulsively.
"But, May, honestly.... Have a heart!... You don't really look on me as engaged to you?"
"Why not?"
"But ... but ... I thought you had forgotten all about me."
"What, after all those beautiful letters you wrote!"
"Boy and girl affair," babbled George.
"Was it, indeed!"
"But, May!..."
Hamilton Beamish had been listening to these exchanges with a rapidly rising temperature. His heart was pounding feverishly in his bosom. There is no one who becomes so primitive, when gripped by love, as the man who all his life has dwelt in the cool empyrean of the intellect. For twenty years and more, Hamilton Beamish had supposed that he was above the crude passions of the ordinary man, and when love had got him it got him good. And now, standing there and listening to these two, he was conscious of a jealousy so keen that he could no longer keep silent. Hamilton Beamish, the thinker, had ceased to be: and there stood in his place Hamilton Beamish, the descendant of ancestors who had conducted their love affairs with stout clubs and who, on seeing a rival, wasted no time in calm reflection but jumped on him like a ton of bricks and did their best to bite his head off. If you had given him a bearskin and taken away his spectacles, Hamilton Beamish at this moment would have been Prehistoric Man.