The Flyers | Page 2

the
clubhouse, berating the unfortunate elements, and waiting for the last
express with a persistency which allowed three or four earlier trains to
come and go unnoticed. The cheerful highball was coming into its own.
A stern winter of bridge had not killed the ardour of certain
worshippers; continuous criticism of play arose from the table in the
corner where two men and two women were engaged with the cards.
The perennial bore, who noses into everything in order to sniff his own
wit, sauntered amiably from group to group, pouring out jests as murky
as the night itself. He saw none of the scowls nor heard the toe-taps; he
went blithely along his bridgeless way.
"I say, Brown, I saw your wife on the street yesterday, but she didn't
see me," he observed to the blase-looking man in corduroys.
"Ya-as," returned the other, calmly staring past him; "so she told me
last night." The bore and his blissful smile passed on to the next group.
There, two or three women were chatting with as many men, yawning
and puffing at their cigarettes, bored by the risque stories the men were
telling, but smiling as though they had not already heard them from
other men. Occasional remarks, dropped softly into the ears of the

women, may have brought faint blushes to their cheeks, but the
firelight was a fickle consort to such changes. The sly turn of a
sentence gave many a double meaning; the subtle glance of the eye
intended no harm. Dobson's new toast to "fair women" earned a roar of
laughter, but afterwards Dobson was called to account by a husband
who realised. A man over in the corner was thumping aimlessly on the
piano; a golf fanatic was vigorously contending that he had driven 243
yards against the wind; a tennis enthusiast was lamenting the fact that
the courts were too soft to be used; there was a certain odour of
rain-soaked clothes in the huge room, ascendant even above the smell
of cigarettes. Altogether, it was a night that owed much to the weather.
Mrs. Scudaway, dashing horsewoman and exponent of the free rein,
was repeating the latest story concerning an intimate friend of every
one present--and, consequently, absent.
"She's just sailed for Europe, and that good-looking actor friend of the
family happened to go on the same steamer," she was saying with a
joyous smile.
"Accidents will happen," remarked some one, benevolently.
"Where's her husband? I haven't seen him with her in months," came
from one of the men.
"Oh, they have two children, you know," explained Mrs. Scudaway.
"Delicate, I hear," said Miss Ratliff.
"Naturally; he nurses them," said Mrs. Scudaway, blowing smoke half-
way across the room through her delicate nostrils.
"I say, Mrs. Scudaway," cried the rapt bore, "don't you ever do
anything but inhale?"
"Yes, I exhale occasionally. No, thanks," as he held forth an ash tray.
Then she flecked the ashes into the fireplace, ten feet away.

"Good Lord, it's a rotten night!" repeated the big man, returning
dismally from a visit to the window. "There's a beastly fog mixed in
with the rain."
"Better blow the fog horn for Henderson," said Ratliff, with a jerk of
his thumb. "He's half seas over already and shipping a lot of water."
Henderson, the convivial member, was on his third siphon.
"I don't care a whoop what McAlpine says," roared an irascible
gentleman on the opposite side of the fireplace; "a man ought to use a
midiron when he gets that kind of a lie. Nobody but an ass would take a
brassie. He's---"
"Just listen to that blethering idiot," said young Rolfe to the lady beside
him. "He ought to be choked."
"I like the way you speak of my husband," she responded gaily.
"Oh, I forgot. He is your husband, isn't he?" Then, after a moment's
easy contemplation of the pretty young woman and a scornful glance at
the golfer: "Lucky, but a very poor watchdog."
"He barks beautifully," resented the young wife, with a loyal grimace.
"That's why you're not afraid of him," he said quickly.
"Don't you think he'd bite?"
"They never do."
"Well, you just try him, that's all," remarked the young wife coldly,
rising and moving away, a touch of red in her cheeks.
"I will," he sang out genially, as he crossed his legs and stretched his
feet out to the fire. She looked back with a mirthless smile on her lips.
The man at the piano struck up the insidious "La Mattchiche,"
suggestive of the Bal Tabarin and other Fourteenth of July devotions.

"Don't play that, Barkley," complained the big man, as every one began
beating time to the fascinating air. "I'm trying to forget Paris."
"Can you ever forget that night in Maxim's---" began Mrs.