T. Sandys was invited to join the society, but declined, and thus never quite knew what they did, nor can any outsider know, there being a regulation among the Tommies against telling.  I believe, however, that they were a brotherhood, with sisters.  You had to pass an examination in unrequited love, showing how you had suffered, and after that either the men or the women (I forget which) dressed in white to the throat, and then each got some other’s old love’s hand to hold, and you all sat on the floor and thought hard.  There may have been even more in it than this, for one got to know Tommies at sight by a sort of careworn halo round the brow, and it is said that the House of Commons was several times nearly counted out because so many of its middle-aged members were holding the floor in another place.

Of course there were also the Anti-Tommies, who called themselves (rather vulgarly) the Tummies.  Many of them were that shape.  They held that, though you had loved in vain, it was no such mighty matter to boast of; but they were poor in argument, and their only really strong card was that Mr. Sandys was stoutish himself.

Their organs in the press said that he was a man of true genius, and slightly inclined to embonpoint.

This maddened him, but on the whole his return was a triumph, and despite thoughts of Grizel he was very, very happy, for he was at play again.  He was a boy, and all the ladies were girls.  Perhaps the lady he saw most frequently was Mrs. Jerry’s stepdaughter.  Lady Pippinworth was a friend of Lady Rintoul, and had several times visited her at the Spittal, but that was not the sole reason why Tommy so frequently drank tea with her.  They had met first at a country house, where, one night after the ladies had retired to rest, Lady Pippinworth came stealing into the smoking-room with the tidings that there were burglars in the house.  As she approached her room she had heard whispers, and then, her door being ajar, she had peeped upon the miscreants.  She had also seen a pile of her jewellery on the table, and a pistol keeping guard on top of it.  There were several men in the house, but that pistol cowed all of them save Tommy.  “If we could lock them in!” someone suggested, but the key was on the wrong side of the door.  “I shall put it on the right side,” Tommy said pluckily, “if you others will prevent their escaping by the window”; and with characteristic courage he set off for her Ladyship’s room.  His intention was to insert his hand, whip out the key, and lock the door on the outside, a sufficiently hazardous enterprise; but what does he do instead?  Locks the door on the inside, and goes for the burglars with his fists!  A happy recollection of Corp’s famous one from the shoulder disposed at once of the man who had seized the pistol; with the other gentleman Tommy had a stand-up fight in which both of them took and gave, but when support arrived, one burglar was senseless on the floor and T. Sandys was sitting on