Mr Mortimer was seated at breakfast. His rooms were situated in a terrace leading out of a fashionable thoroughfare in Pimlico, but the terrace itself was not at all fashionable, consisting, as it did, chiefly of lodging-houses resorted to by medical students, clerks, actors, and ladies' maids and men-servants out of places. The keeper of the house was a burly, strident-voiced, strong-willed lady of forty, rough but not unkindly, who always gave Jim what she liked (as opposed to what he liked) for breakfast.
This morning--the morning after his arrival in town from Eastfolkshire--his first meal was composed of cold eggs-and-bacon and cold tea--not a deliriously appetising repast, 'tis true; but then, if a man is summoned to breakfast at nine and eventually crawls into his sitting-room at a quarter past ten, what can he expect? And Mrs Freeman was not the sort of lady to keep anything warm for lie-abed lodgers.
Having nibbled half a cold egg, Mortimer turned his attention to the loaf, and eventually breakfasted off bread and marmalade. The butter he eschewed, as it appeared to claim first cousinship with train-oil. As the tea was by this time black, and bitter to the taste, Jim sought to appease his thirst with a bottle of beer from the rickety sideboard. The cork of the bottle being in a state of crumbling decrepitude, Mortimer had to delay his drink while, with the help of a spoon and some expletives, he fished the broken fragments out of the beer.
"A picture," observed a quiet voice, while Jim was thus engaged, "calculated to melt the heart of any maid."
"Hullo--Koko!"
"While I object to that nickname," gravely responded the little man who had entered, as he removed his hat and displayed an almost entirely bald head, "I am compelled to reply to it. Well, how are you, young feller?"
Jim replied in a testy murmur that he felt all right, and proceeded to drag more fragments of cork out of the beer. Meanwhile, the man who had come in laid his hat, gloves, and stick on the far end of the table, and then arranged his tie in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece.
"Doocid dude you are, Koko!" said Jim, looking at his friend over the edge of the glass; "why," springing up, "you've grown!"
Now, as the caller was but an inch or two over five feet in height, there was every reason why he should have felt congratulated by this remark.
"No," he said, in a resigned voice, "I haven't grown--I've only got some of my fat off."