it was Ellis and I who were “colonial.”  I could have borne it better if they hadn’t been so polite, and so anxious to hide their opinion of Hawthornden’s.  The girl—­oh! the girl....  Her name is Nellie.  Really very pretty.  Only about eighteen, but as self-possessed as twenty-eight.  Evidently she had always been used to treating her parents as equals; she talked quite half the time, and contradicted her mother as flatly as Ellis contradicts me.  Mr Smith didn’t talk much.  And Ellis didn’t at first—­he was too timid and awkward—­really not at all like himself.  However, Miss Nellie soon made him talk, and they got quite friendly and curt with each other.  Curious thing—­Ellis never notices women’s clothes; very interested in his own, and in other men’s, but not in women’s!  So I expect Nellie’s didn’t make much impression on him.  But truly they were stylish.  Much too gorgeous for a young girl—­oh! you’ve no idea!—­but not vulgar.  They’d been bought in London, in Dover Street.  Better than mine, and better than her mother’s.  I will say this for her—­she wore them without any self-consciousness, though she came in for a good deal of staring.  Heaven knows what they cost!  I’d be afraid to guess.  But then you see the Smiths had come to England to spend money, and—­well—­they were spending it.  All their ideas were larger than ours.

When dinner was over Nellie wanted to know what we could do to amuse ourselves.  Well, it was a showery night, and of course there was nothing.  Then Ellis said, in his patronizing way: 

“Suppose we go and knock the balls about a bit?”

And Nellie said, “Knock the balls about a bit?”

“Yes,” said Master Ellis, “billiards—­you know.”

All four of us went to the billiard-room.  And Ellis began to knock the balls about a bit.  His father installed a billiard-table in his own house a few years ago.  The idea was to “keep the boy at home.”  It didn’t, of course, not a bit.  Ellis is a pretty good player, but he did nearly all his practising at his club.  I’ve often heard his mother regret the eighty pounds odd that that billiard-table cost.... I play a bit, you know.  Nellie Smith would not try at first, and Papa Smith was smoking a cigar and he said he couldn’t do justice to a cigar and a cue at the same time.  So Ellis and I had a twenty-five up.  He gave me ten and I beat him—­probably because he would keep on smoking cigarettes, just to show Papa Smith how well he could keep the smoke out of his eyes.  Then he asked Nellie if she’d “try.”  She said she would if her pa would.  And she and her pa put themselves against Ellis and me.

Well, I’ll cut it short.  That girl, with her pink-and-white complexion—­she began right off with a break of twenty-eight.  You should have seen Ellis’s face.  It was the funniest thing I ever saw in my life.  I can’t remember anything that ever struck me as half so funny.  It seems that they have plenty of time for billiards out in Winnipeg, and a very high-class table.  After a while Ellis saw the funniness of it too.  He made a miss and then he said: