“Paris, after a good dinner?”
“You’d never guess. Hold on to your umbrella now, Percival, for I’m about to startle you. I’ve been in Ireland.”
“Never!”
“A fact, I assure you.”
“And you’re alive to tell the tale?”
“Ireland is not bad quarters, I can tell you. I was capitally fed. I had a game of Polo in the Phœnix Park—and that is a park. I had as good a rubber at the Kildare Street Club as ever I played at the Raleigh. I saw some very fit soldiering at the Curragh of Kildare. I landed my thirty-seven-pound salmon from a river with an impossible name in Connemara. I took to Connemara con amore—excuse the pun, it’s rather early. And I’ll let you into a secret, Percival: I mean to return for the grouse on the 20th of August.”
“Apropos of Ireland, get Minniver to show you two letters I received last week from some people calling themselves my cousins; they are the richest things in town. They have had nothing in the smoking-room of the Garrick so good since the night old Fladgate told Thackeray that, in order to render his lectures on the Four Georges a success, he should hire a piano.”
Jack Pommery is a clever, hard-working young barrister—a coming man. He was senior wrangler of his year at Cambridge, and carried off one or two “big things.” He rowed in the ‘varsity eight and boxed like a prize-fighter. Pommery, while he believes in work, stoutly maintains that the brain can only do a certain amount of it, and under cover of this theory casts aside wig and gown for a run with the Pytchley, a pull on the Thames, a breezer in the Channel under double reefs, a month on the moors—in a word, he goes in for what Micky Free termed “hapes o’ divarshin.”
“I’ve just seen your fleuriste, Jack. She still keeps the key of the blue chamber.”
“She’ll not sell me.”