was going to keep it up.”      

       “He seems to me,” said Miss Greene, “a dear, good fellow. You are one of those people who never know when they are well off.”      

       “I know he is a good fellow,” agreed Mrs. Korner, “and I am very fond of him. It is just because I am fond of him that I hate feeling ashamed of him. I want him to be a manly man, to do the things that other men do.”      

       “Do all the ordinary sort of men swear and get occasionally drunk?”      

       “Of course they do,” asserted Mrs. Korner, in a tone of authority. “One does not want a man to be a milksop.”      

       “Have you ever seen a drunken man?” inquired the bosom friend, who was nibbling sugar.     

       “Heaps,” replied Mrs. Korner, who was sucking marmalade off her fingers.     

       By which Mrs. Korner meant that some half a dozen times in her life she had visited the play, choosing by preference the lighter form of British drama. The first time she witnessed the real thing, which happened just       precisely a month later, long after the conversation here recorded had been forgotten by the parties most concerned, no one could have been more utterly astonished than was Mrs. Korner.     

       How it came about Mr. Korner was never able to fully satisfy himself. Mr. Korner was not the type that serves the purpose of the temperance lecturer. His “first glass” he had drunk more years ago than he could recollect, and since had tasted the varied contents of many others. But never before had Mr. Korner exceeded, nor been tempted to exceed, the limits of his favourite virtue, moderation.     

       “We had one bottle of claret between us,” Mr. Korner would often recall to his mind, “of which he drank the greater part. And then he brought out the little green flask. He said it was made from pears—that in Peru they kept it specially for Children's parties. Of course, that may have been his joke; but in any case I cannot see how just one glass—I wonder could I have taken more than one glass while he was talking.” It was a point that worried Mr. Korner.     

       The “he” who had talked, possibly, to such bad effect was a distant cousin of Mr. Korner's, one Bill Damon, chief mate of the 

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