“Choke him off,” murmured a smart comedian to his neighbor, “for pity’s sake. He’s going to tell us how he threw over the swell girl he was engaged to a month before their wedding—for Petsie’s sake; and how he has brought his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, and for ever forfeited the right to call himself an English gentleman. I know, bless you! I had it all from him last night at the Mummers’ Club, and this morning at his rooms in Wigmore Street.”
“Rustleton!”
“Order!” yelled Rustleton again.
“Order!” echoed Funkstein, turning a circular pair of rather bibulous and bloodshot blue eyes upon the protestant bridegroom. “Oond vy order?”
“Permimme to reminyou,” said Rustleton, with laborious distinctness, “that the present Head of my fammary, the Rironaurable the Earl of Pomphrey—in poinnofac’, my Fara—is at the present momen’ of speaking in the enjoymen’ of exhallent health, an’ nowistanning present painfully strained rela’ions essisting bi’ween us, I have no desire—nor, I feel convinned, has my wife, Lady Rustleton, any desire—to, in poinnofac’, usurp his shoes, or play leapfrog over his—in poinnofac’, his coffin. Therefore, the referen’ of the distinnwished gelleman who, in poinnofac’, holds the floor, to the coronet of a Countess in premature conneshion with the brow of my newly-marriwife I am compelled to regard as absorrutely ram bad form!”
“Tam bad vat?” shrieked Funkstein.
Rustleton leaned over the table. His eyes were set in a leaden-hued countenance. His hair hung lankly over his damp forehead. He nerved himself for a supreme effort. “Ununerrarrably ram baform!” he said, and with this polysyllabic utterance fell into a crystal dish of melted ice, and a comatose condition.
“Bad, bad boy!” said the recently-made Lady Rustleton, biting her notorious cherry underlip, and darting a brilliant glance at Funkstein out of her celebrated eyes as Rustleton was snatched from his perilous position by a strong-armed chorus beauty; and the low comedian, who had become famous since the production of The Charity Girl, dried the Viscount’s head with a table-napkin and propped him firmly in his chair.
“It is not de Boy, but de man dat drinks it,” giggled Funkstein, with recovered good temper. “Ach ja, oond also de voman. How many bints hof I not seen you....”
“That’ll do, thanks,” said the newly-made Viscountess, with her well-known expression of prim propriety. “Not so much reminiscing, you know; it’s what poor Tonnie called ‘ahem’d bad form’ just now, didn’t you, ducky?”