"When you're dead you don't have to take responsibility for your deputy's mistakes."
"That's it, is it? Mrs. Millington setting the Thames on fire?"
"Her zeal sometimes outruns her discretion," said Elsie with a smile. "That's what's chiefly worrying Joyce."
I picked up my hat and stick and moved towards the door.
"And Joyce is losing her nerve?" I hazarded.
"She's not up to her usual form," was all Elsie would answer.
"Give her my love," I said at the door, "and best wishes for a quick recovery. If she isn't well in two days' time, I shall carry her off by main force and put her into a nursing home."
Then I went off to lunch at the Club, and found fault with the food, the wine, the cigars and all creation. Paddy Culling opened a subscription list to buy me a box of liver pills. The Seraph—after I had been two minutes at Adelphi Terrace—said he was sorry Joyce was no better.... I thanked him for his sympathy, and sat down to read the current copy of the New Militant.
In my careless, hot-blooded youth I made a collection of inanimate journalistic curiosities. It was my sole offence against the wise rule that to collect anything—from wives up to postage stamps—is a mark of incipient mental decay. There was the Punch, with the cartoon showing the relief of Khartoum; and I remember I had a copy of the suppressed issue of the Times, when the compositors usurped control of Empire and edited one of Harcourt's Budget speeches on lines of their own. There was also a pink Pall Mall Gazette, bought wet from the machine at a shilling the copy, when paper ran out and they borrowed the pink reserve rolls of the Globe. I had a copy of another journal that described in moving language the massacre of the Peking Legations. The Legations were, in fact, never massacred, but they should have been on any theory of probability, and, for aught I know, the enterprising journalist may have believed with Wilde that Nature tends to copy Art.
I also had several illustrated weeklies depicting—by the pen of Our Special Artist—that first Coronation Ceremony of Edward the Seventh, and the verbal account of it given by "A Peeress" who had been present. More lately I acquired the original American paper which sent the Titanic to her grave with the band playing "Nearer, my God, to Thee."...