"Ha, ha, haw!" Bingo's joyous explosion revealed to the outraged woman the fact that she had been "had." "Haw, haw! What a beggar you are to rot, Beauvayse! and that makes five to us."
Lady Hannah, vibrating with womanly indignation, had made her long-delayed stroke, missed the pyramid ball, and sent Pink spinning into the pocket. She threw aside her cue and rubbed her fingers angrily. She hated losing, and they were playing for shilling lives and half-a-crown on the game.
"You—schoolboys!" She threw them a glance of disdain, as Beauvayse, his seraphic face agrin, screwed in his supererogatory eyeglass, and lounged over the table. "You artless babes! Did you suppose I should be likely to swallow such a feuille de chou without even oil and vinegar? For pity's sake, leave off winking, Bingo! It's a habit that dates back to the era when women wore ringlets and white book-muslin, and men sported shaggy white beaver hats and pegtop trousers, and all the world read the novels of Lever and Dickens."
"Have Lever and Boz gone out?" asked Beauvayse, pocketing his pyramid ball. "I play at Blue." He hit Blue scientifically off the cushion and went on. "Read 'em myself over and over again, and find 'em give points in the way of amusement to the piffle Mudie sends out. Not that I pretend to be a judge of literature. Only know when I'm not bored, you know. You to play, Lord Henry."
But the senior officer of the Staff, Lady Hannah's partner, had vanished. Somebody passing the open window of the billiard-room had whistled a bar or so of a particularly pleasant little tune. Another man took Lord Henry's place, and the game went on, but never finished, for one by one, after the same quiet, unobtrusive fashion, the male players melted away.... Left alone, Lady Hannah, feeling uncommonly like the idle boy in the nursery-story who asked the beasts and birds and insects to play with him, betook herself to bed.
The arrogance of men! she thought as she hung her transformation Pompadour coiffure on the looking-glass. How cool, how unshaken in their conviction of superiority, in spite of all deference, courtesy, pretence of consideration for Queen Dolt.... But she would show them all one of these days, what could be achieved by a unit of the despised majority....
"I should like to see him at night-work," she said afterwards, when, very late, her Bingo appeared in the shadow of the conjugal mosquito-curtains.
"You wouldn't," was her martial lord's reply.
"Wouldn't what?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in tropical sleeping attire.
Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied to her reflection in the looking-glass: