“Go abroad then,” retorted Vandermeer. “If the lady is of the kind I take her to be, she won’t mind crossing the Channel when she knows there’s a golden feathered coot in Boulogne just dying to moult in her hand.”
“You are crude and vulgar in your ideas, Van,” said Huckaby. “Gentlemen of Quixtus’s position no more go to Boulogne for a holiday than they frequent Ramsgate boarding-houses. And they don’t give large sums of money to expensively dressed ladies with conjecturable means of support.”
“He’s such a fool that he would never guess anything,” argued Vandermeer.
“Hold on,” said Billiter, “you’re on the wrong tack altogether. I told you she was a lady.” His manner changed subtly, the moribund instinct of birth crackling suddening into a tiny flame. “I don’t know if you two quite realise what that means, but to Quixtus it would mean everything.”
“I’m a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge——” began Huckaby, ruffled.
“Then you must have met a lady connected with somebody in your damned Academy,” said Billiter, who had been sent down from Oxford.
“The University of Cambridge isn’t an Academy,” said Huckaby, waxing quarrelsome.
“And a woman who subsists on gifts from her gentlemen friends can’t be a real lady,” said Vandermeer.
“Oh go to blazes, both of you!” cried Billiter, angrily.
He clapped on his hat and rose. But as he had been sitting in the corner of the divan, between Huckaby and Vandermeer, with the table in front of him, a dignified exit was impracticable. Indeed, he was immediately plumped down again on his seat by a tug on each side of his coat, and adjured in the vernacular not to stray from the paths of wisdom.