"On principle," I answered. "In the first place it costs a franc which might be spent in food and raiment, and in the second we desire to preserve our ideals from the contaminating spectacle of commercial art."
"Do you play much tennis?" asked Number Two, with no desire to snub me (as I deserved) for fatuity, but through sheer lack of interest in my observation.
"No," said I.
"Shoot?"
"No; there is not much shooting to be got in the Boulevard Saint-Michel."
"Oh," she remarked. "Where's that?"
"Paris," said I.
"Oh yes. You live in Paris." And she regarded me with the expression of bored curiosity exhibited by a superior child before the Yak's enclosure at the Zoological Gardens. An English country-bred maiden's cosmic horizon was sadly limited in those days. Now I believe she has extended it to include the more depressing forms of drama when she pays her annual visit to London. There was a silence after which she enquired whether I fished. As my ideas of fishing were restricted to the patient hosts—pale shades of Acheron—who have angled off the quays of the Seine for centuries and have till now caught nothing, I smiled and shook my head.
"The Browns have taken a fishing in Scotland," observed Number One taking her eyes from the curate, "and I'm to join them next month."
"Myra Brown is going to be married, I hear."