But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it, and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with laughter. At first every one stared aghast (“stared aghast!”--how is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then haw-hawed till he couldn’t lift his champagne, the rest of us followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than gently smile. “See here,” he said ever so candidly of Clovelly’s best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified figure in the book--“I liked the way you drew that muff. He was such an awful outsider, wasn’t he? All talk, and hypocrite down to his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went ‘slumming’ and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!”-- [This was Clovelly’s heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said himself, “with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness, and a sweet creation altogether.”] “I said, that’s poetic justice, that’s the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture. He said, ‘Go to blazes,’ and he fixed up that marriage--and there you are! Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!”
Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow. What he said of myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round, with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.
How is Roscoe? I didn’t see as much of him as you did, but I liked him. Take my tip for it, that woman will make trouble for him some day. She is the biggest puzzle I ever met. I never could tell whether she liked him or hated him; but it seems to me that either would be the ruin of any “Christom man.” I know she saw something of him while she was in London, because her quarters were next to those of my aunt the dowager (whose heart the gods soften at my wedding!) in Queen Anne’s Mansions, S.W., and who actually liked Mrs. F., called on her, and asked her to dinner, and Roscoe too, whom she met at her place. I believe my aunt would have used her influence to get him a good living, if he had played his cards properly; but I expect he wouldn’t be patronised, and he went for a “mickonaree,” as they say in the South Seas.... Well, I’m off to the Spicy Isles, then back again to marry a wife. “Go thou and do likewise.”