Howard Spence entered in the midst of the lesson.

“Hello, Brent,” said he, genially, “you may be interested to know I got that little matter through without a hitch to-day.”

“I continue to marvel at you,” said the lion, and made it no trumps.

Since this is a veracious history, and since we have wandered so far from home and amidst such strange, if brilliant scenes, it must be confessed that Honora, three days earlier, had entered a certain shop in New York and inquired for a book on bridge.  Yes, said the clerk, he had such a treatise, it had arrived from England a week before.  She kept it looked up in her drawer, and studied it in the mornings with a pack of cards before her.

Given the proper amount of spur, anything in reason can be mastered.

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

Volume 4.

CHAPTER VII

OF CERTAIN DELICATE MATTERS

In the religious cult of Gad and Meni, practised with such enthusiasm at Quicksands, the Saints’ days were polo days, and the chief of all festivals the occasion of the match with the Banbury Hunt Club —­Quicksands’s greatest rival.  Rival for more reasons than one, reasons too delicate to tell.  Long, long ago there appeared in Punch a cartoon of Lord Beaconsfield executing that most difficult of performances, an egg dance.  We shall be fortunate indeed if we get to the end of this chapter without breaking an egg!

Our pen fails us in a description of that festival of festivals, the Banbury one, which took place early in September.  We should have to go back to Babylon and the days of King Nebuchadnezzar. (Who turns out to have been only a regent, by the way, and his name is now said to be spelled rezzar).  How give an idea of the libations poured out to Gad and the shekels laid aside for Meni in the Quicksands Temple?

Honora privately thought that building ugly, and it reminded her of a collection of huge yellow fungi sprawling over the ground.  A few of the inevitable tortured cedars were around it.  Between two of the larger buildings was wedged a room dedicated to the worship of Bacchus, to-day like a narrow river-gorge at flood time jammed with tree-trunks—­some of them, let us say, water-logged—­and all grinding together with an intolerable noise like a battle.  If you happened to be passing the windows, certain more or less intelligible sounds might separate themselves from the bedlam.

“Four to five on Quicksands!”

“That stock isn’t worth a d—­n!”

“She’s gone to South Dakota.”

Honora, however, is an heretic, as we know.  Without going definitely into her reasons, these festivals had gradually become distasteful to her.  Perhaps it would be fairer to look at them through the eyes of Lily Dallam, who was in her element on such days, and regarded them as the most innocent and enjoyable of occasions, and perhaps they were.