Clovis pretended afterwards that he didn't go white above
the collar-line for the fraction of a second.

  ``All the same,'' he said, ``you ought not to joke about
such things.  There really are such people.  I've known
people who've met them.  To think of all the adorable things
there are to eat in the world, and then to go through life
munching sawdust and being proud of it.''

  ``They're like the Flagellants of the Middle Ages, who
went about mortifying themselves.''

  ``They had some excuse,'' said Clovis. ``They did it to
save their immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me
that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good
wines has got a soul, or a stomach either.  He's simply got
the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.''

  Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into tender
intimacies with a succession of rapidly disappearing
oysters.

  ``I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,''
he resumed presently.  ``They not only forgive our
unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on
being perfectly horrid to them.  Once they arrive at the
supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit
of the thing.  There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism
that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an
oyster.  Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for
the first time tonight.''

  ``It looks like a great many others you've had lately,
only worse.  New dinner waistcoats are becoming a habit with
you.''

  ``They say one always pays for the excesses of one's
youth; mercifully that isn't true about one's clothes.  My
mother is thinking of getting married.''

  ``Again!''

  ``It's the first time.''

  ``Of course, you ought to know.  I was under the
impression that she'd been married once or twice at least.''

  ``Three times, to be mathematically exact.  I meant that
it was the first time she'd thought about getting married;
the other times she did it without thinking.  As a matter of
fact, it's really I who am doing the thinking for her in
this case.  You see, it's quite two years since her last
husband died.''

  ``You evidently think that brevity is the soul of
widowhood.''

``Well, it struck me that she was getting moped, and
beginning to settle down, which wouldn't suit her a bit.
The first symptom that I noticed was when she began to
complain that we were living beyond our income.  All decent
people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who
aren't respectable live beyond other people's.  A few gifted
individuals manage to do both.''

  ``It's hardly so much a gift as an industry.''

  ``The crisis came,'' returned Clovis, ``when she suddenly
started the theory that late hours were bad for one, and
wanted me to be in by one o'clock every night.  Imagine that
sort of thing for me, who was eighteen on my last
birthday.''

  ``On your last two birthdays, to be mathematically
exact.''

  ``Oh, well, that's not my fault.  I'm not going to arrive
at nineteen as long as my mother remains at thirty-seven.
One must have some regard for appearances.''

  ``Perhaps your mother would age a little in the process of
settling down.''

  ``That's the last thing she'd think of.  Feminine
reformations always start in on the failings of other
people.  That's why I was so keen on the husband idea.''

  ``Did you go as far as to select the gentleman, or did you
merely throw out a general idea, and trust to the force of
suggestion?''

  ``If one wants a thing done in a hurry one must see to it
oneself.  I found a military Johnny hanging round on a loose
end at the club, and took him home to lunch once or twice.
He'd spent most of his life on the Indian frontier, building
roads, and relieving famines and minimizing earthquakes, and
all that sort of thing that one does do on frontiers.  He
could talk sense to a peevish cobra in fifteen native
languages, and probably knew what to do if you found a rogue