"I am caressing my past," I answered. "Wiedersheim's Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates, Smith Woodward's Vertebrate Palæontology—why it's like visiting old prospects and seeing how the moss has grown over the stones."
I hummed a comic song and then said: "As I can't burn the house down, I shall go to bed."
N——: "You can talk if you like, it won't interfere."
E——: "He's talking to his besoms."
"Certainly," I said to N——, absent-mindedly.
E——: "You ought to have said 'Thank you.'"
I blew out my cheeks and E—— laughed.
N——: "How do you spell 'regimental'?"
I told her—wrongly, and E—— said I was in a devilish mood.
"If we say that we have no sin" I chanted in reply, "we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." I next gave a bit out of a speech by Disraeli with exaggerated rhetorical gestures.