The waiter came with the liquor, and Montague thanked his neighbour, Miss Price.  Anabel Price was her name, and they called her “Billy”; she was a tall and splendidly formed creature, and he learned in due time that she was a famous athlete.  She must have divined that he would feel a little lost in this crowd of intimates, and set to work to make him feel at home—­an attempt in which she was not altogether successful.

They were bound for a shooting-lodge, and so she asked him if he were fond of shooting.  He replied that he was; in answer to a further question he said that he had hunted chiefly deer and wild turkey.  “Ah, then you are a real hunter!” said Miss Price.  “I’m afraid you’ll scorn our way.”

“What do you do?” he inquired.

“Wait and you’ll see,” replied she; and added, casually, “When you get to be pally with us, you’ll conclude we don’t furnish.”

Montague’s jaw dropped just a little.  He recovered himself, however, and said that he presumed so, or that he trusted not; afterward, when he had made inquiries and found out what he should have said, he had completely forgotten what he had said.—­Down in a hotel in Natchez there was an old head-waiter, to whom Montague had once appealed to seat him next to a friend.  At the next meal, learning that the request had been granted, he said to the old man, “I’m afraid you have shown me partiality”; to which the reply came, “I always tries to show it as much as I kin.”  Montague always thought of this whenever he recalled his first encounter with “Billy” Price.

The young lady on the other side of him now remarked that Robbie was ordering another “topsy-turvy lunch.”  He inquired what sort of a lunch that was; she told him that Robbie called it a “digestion exercise.”  That was the only remark that Miss de Millo addressed to him during the meal (Miss Gladys de Mille, the banker’s daughter, known as “Baby” to her intimates).  She was a stout and round-faced girl, who devoted herself strictly to the business of lunching; and Montague noticed at the end that she was breathing rather hard, and that her big round eyes seemed bigger than ever.

Conversation was general about the table, but it was not easy conversation to follow.  It consisted mostly of what is known as “joshing,” and involved acquaintance with intimate details of personalities and past events.  Also, there was a great deal of slang used, which kept a stranger’s wits on the jump.  However, Montague concluded that all his deficiencies were made up for by his brother, whose sallies were the cause of the loudest laughter.  Just now he seemed to the other more like the Oliver he had known of old—­for Montague had already noted a change in him.  At home there had never been any end to his gaiety and fun, and it was hard to get him to take anything seriously; but now he kept all his jokes for company, and when he was alone he was in deadly earnest.  Apparently he was working hard over his pleasures.