Even this was nothing to the soreness in our legs and arms and the famous "back-muscles" that Binks brought into play. We spent all our evenings for the next fortnight rubbing arnica into them—also a wonderful liniment which our landlady gave us. It must have been a fine liniment for it smelled so strong that people turned around and looked after us on the street, as if they thought we ought to be quarantined and were in two minds about calling a policeman. And we didn't dare visit our friends. But then what's the use of going to see a lady if you moan in pain every time you try to put your arm around—well, around the back of the chair?
REFRESHMENTS AT FIVE
Refreshments at Five
Five o'clock appears to be a very critical time in the day. On the manner in which the next three-quarters of an hour are spent may depend one's well-being and good temper for the rest of the day and the evening and possibly the first couple of hours of the morrow.
Some people—low persons who need the money or whose bosses will not permit them to leave the office—make a habit of working through till six, or whatever time it is that they punch the clock and go home in a street-car strap. Naturally such persons have no place in an article of this character.
To sensitive and cultured people who have spent the afternoon playing bridge or in the cellar brewing the family liquor—that, we believe, is the intellectual pastime of the moment—or in mahogany-furnished offices persuading innocent folk with money to buy Nicaragua banana-lands or bunk stocks on punk margins, five o'clock is the blessed hour of surcease and repose. It is balm in Gilead, cool rains after the heat of the day, a friendly hotel after walking across a "dry" county, divorce after—oh, g'wan and make your own metaphors!
Personally we are an ardent and determined five-o'clocker. We have played it every way there is—straight, for place, for show, and across the board. There is no kind of five-o'clock performance—in accordance, that is, with the purity and piety of our character and upbringing—that we have not done or witnessed. We have attended teas of every description and shade of color, pink, yellow, mauve, and with dashes of cerise. We have gone to the tango kind, and to those discreet teas in sequestered corners of tea-rooms to which one conducts fair students of the drama after the matinee.
In older and perhaps happier—certainly freer—days, we were a frequent guest and occasional host at little informal five-o'clock functions, where one inquired of the rest of the company what they were having and requested the attendant to "fill 'em up again, Jawn!" We attended such functions in clubs, cafes, and those democratic places of resort which were entered by swinging doors—up to eleven on ordinary nights and seven on Saturdays. And we did this as part of that systematic study of humanity—including the things they eat and the drinks they drink—which is recommended so earnestly by the philosophers.
All this is by way of letting the reader see how thoroughly qualified we are by nature and training to write on this important subject of five-o'clock refreshments. We say "important" advisedly and with no ironic intent. We have devoted to the question of how best to spend the time between five and a quarter to six much time, energy, and serious thought—not without considerable difficulty and several vigorous rows with persons we have at various times consented to work for. And, as a result of our studies, we are convinced that rest and refreshment at five are a human necessity, whether you take it with two lumps or with soda, and whether you eat out of the "curate" or off the free-lunch counter.