“Thank you, but this one disturbs me sufficiently.”

“Then why do you put up with it?”

“Why do I put up with that Christmas number supplement over the mantel-piece?  It’s part of the furniture.  I was asked to let it be here and I couldn’t be rude.”

“No, it’s not in your nature.  What a bore it must be to feed it!  Let me see, I suppose you give it canary seed biscuits—­I hope you don’t give it butter.”

“Don’t be an ass!” roared Lancelot.  “You don’t imagine I bother my head whether it eats butter or—­or marmalade.”

“Who feeds it then?”

“Mary Ann, of course.”

“She comes in and feeds it?”

“Certainly.”

“Several times a day?”

“I suppose so.”

“Lancelot,” said Peter, solemnly.  “Mary Ann’s mashed on you.”

Lancelot shrank before Peter’s remark as a burglar from a policeman’s bull’s-eye.  The bull’s-eye seemed to cast a new light on Mary Ann, too, but he felt too unpleasantly dazzled to consider that for the moment; his whole thought was to get out of the line of light.

“Nonsense!” he answered; “why, I’m hardly ever in when she feeds it, and I believe it eats all day long—­gets supplied in the morning like a coal-scuttle.  Besides, she comes in to dust and all that when she pleases.  And I do wish you wouldn’t use that word ‘mashed.’  I loathe it.”

Indeed, he writhed under the thought of being coupled with Mary Ann.  The thing sounded so ugly—­so squalid.  In the actual, it was not so unpleasant, but looked at from the outside—­unsympathetically—­it was hopelessly vulgar, incurably plebeian.  He shuddered.

“I don’t know,” said Peter.  “It’s a very expressive word, is ‘mashed.’  But I will make allowance for your poetical feelings and give up the word—­except in its literal sense, of course.  I’m sure you wouldn’t object to mashing a music publisher!”

Lancelot laughed with false heartiness.  “Oh, but if I’m to write those popular ballads, you say he’ll become my best friend.”

“Of course he will,” cried Peter, eagerly sniffing at the red herring Lancelot had thrown across the track.  “You stand out for a royalty on every copy, so that if you strike ile—­oh, I beg your pardon, that’s another of the phrases you object to, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Lancelot, laughing on.  “You know I only object to that in connection with English peers marrying the daughters of men who have done it.”

“Oh, is that it?  I wish you’d publish an expurgated dictionary with most of the words left out, and exact definitions of the conditions under which one may use the remainder.  But I’ve got on a siding.  What was I talking about?”

“Royalty,” muttered Lancelot, languidly.

“Royalty?  No.  You mentioned the aristocracy, I think.”  Then he burst into a hearty laugh.  “Oh, yes—­on that ballad.  Now, look here!  I’ve brought a ballad with me, just to show you—­a thing that is going like wildfire.”