“You don’t owe me the money at all; I made no bargain with you; I am not a moneylender.”

“Pack dick sum Henker!” growled Peter, with a comical grimace. “Was fuer a casuist!  What a swindler you’d make!  I wonder you have the face to deny the debt.  Well, and how did you leave Frau Sauer-Kraut?” he said, deeming it prudent to sheer off the subject.

“Fat as a Christmas turkey.”

“Or a German sausage.  The extraordinary things that woman stuffed herself with!—­chunks of fat, stewed apples, Kartoffel salad—­all mixed up in one plate, as in a dustbin.”

“Don’t!  You make my gorge rise. Ach Himmel! to think that this nation should be musical!  O Music, heavenly maid, how much garlic I have endured for thy sake!”

“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Peter, putting down his whisky that he might throw himself freely back in the easy chair and roar.

“O that garlic!” he said, panting.  “No wonder they smoked so much in Leipsic.  Even so they couldn’t keep the reek out of the staircases.  Still, it’s a great country is Germany.  Our house does a tremendous business in German patents.”

“A great country?  A land of barbarians rather.  How can a people be civilised that eats jam with its meat?”

“Bravo, Lancelot!  You’re in lovely form to-night.  You seem to go a hundred miles out of your way to come the truly British.  First it was oil—­now it’s jam.  There was that aristocratic flash in your eye, too, that look of supreme disdain which brings on riots in Trafalgar Square.  Behind the patriotic, the national note, ’How can a people be civilised that eats jam with its meat?’ I heard the deeper, the oligarchic accent, ‘How can a people be enfranchised that eats meat with its fingers?’ Ah, you are right!  How you do hate the poor!  What bores they are!  You aristocrats—­the products of centuries of culture, comfort, and cocksureness—­will never rid yourselves of your conviction that you are the backbone of England—­no, not though that backbone were picked clean of every scrap of flesh by the rats of Radicalism.”

“What in the devil are you talking about now?” demanded Lancelot.  “You seem to me to go a hundred miles out of your way to twit me with my poverty and my breeding.  One would almost think you were anxious to convince me of the poverty of your breeding.”

“Oh, a thousand pardons!” ejaculated Peter, blushing violently.  “But good heavens, old chap!  There’s your hot temper again.  You surely wouldn’t suspect me, of all people in the world, of meaning anything personal?  I’m talking of you as a class.  Contempt is in your blood—­and quite right!  We’re such snobs, we deserve it.  Why d’ye think I ever took to you as a boy at school?  Was it because you scribbled inaccurate sonatas and I had myself a talent for knocking tunes off the piano?  Not a bit of it.  I thought it was, perhaps, but that was only one of my many youthful errors.