During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness—she had an eerie way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn. That was his home. He had no possessions.
"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got about three hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London Repository, to say nothing of skins and as fine a collection of modern weapons as you ever saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up style to-morrow."
"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a dinner plate or a fork?"
"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be called for in all the shops of London."
He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture. I laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a thousand pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of household clutter, he certainly is that household clutter's potential owner. Between us we developed this incontrovertible proposition.
"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's Stores and purchase a comfortable home?"
"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for the interior of China the day after to-morrow."
"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.
"The interior of China?" I reëchoed, with masculine definiteness.
"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Uranus. You wouldn't go into hysterics if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me, Barbara. It would do him a thundering lot of good."