"He has been very good to me during the war. Otherwise I should have been reduced to picking up cigar ends with a pointed stick on the Boulevards--and a damn precarious livelihood too, considering the shortage of tobacco in this benighted country. He took it into his venerable head that he was going to die and desired to see me. Voltaire remorse on his death-bed, you know."
"I fail to follow," said the literal Andrew.
"All his life he had lived an unbeliever in ME. Now your military intelligence grasps it. My brother Ronald, the runner of the Pawnee Indian, head-flattening system of education, and his wife, especially his wife, the daughter of a lay brother of a bishop who has got a baronetcy for making an enormous fortune out of the war, wouldn't have me at any price. But Theophilus must have muttered some incantation which frightened them, so they surrendered. Poor old Theophilus and I had a touching meeting. He's about as lonely a thing as you could wish to meet. He married an American heiress, who died about eight years ago, and he's as rich as Croesus. We're bosom friends now. As for Mrs. Ronald I sang her songs of Araby including Gounod's 'Ave Maria' with lots of tremolo and convinced her that I'm a saintly personage. It's my proud boast that, on my account, Ronald and herself never spoke for three days. I spent a month in the wilds of Westmorland with them, and as soon as Theophilus got on the mend--he's already performing semi-Archidiaconal functions--I put my hands over my eyes and fled. My God, what a crowd! Give me a drink. I've got four weeks' arrears to make up."
Andrew went into the salle à manger and returned with brandy, syphon and glasses. Helping Bakkus he asked:
"And now, what are you going to do?"
"Nothing, my friend, absolutely nothing. I wallow in the ill-gotten matrimonial gains of Theophilus and Ronald. I wallow modestly, it is true. The richer strata of mire I leave to hogs with whom I'm out of sympathy. You'll have observed that I'm a man of nice discrimination. I choose my hogs. It is the Art of Life."
"Well, here's to you," said Andrew, lifting up his glass.
"And to you."
Bakkus emptied his glass at a draught, breathed a sigh of infinite content and held it out to be refilled.
"And now that I've told you the story of my life, what about you? What's the meaning of this--" he waved a hand--"this reversion to type?"