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Updated: June 10, 2025
"And some of them simply tremendous raps. There!" A confirmatory rap exploded as it seemed between Lewisham and Chaffery. "Eh?" said Chaffery. The mantelpiece opened a dropping fire, and the table went off under Lewisham's nose like a cracker. "You see?" said Chaffery, putting his hands under the tail of his coat. The whole room seemed snapping its fingers at Lewisham for a space.
"She has called to see her mother," said Lewisham. "You, I believe, are Mr. Chaffery?" "I would like to know who the Deuce you are?" said Chaffery, suddenly tilting his head back so as to look through his glasses instead of over them, and laughing genially. "For thoroughgoing Cheek, I'm inclined to think you take the Cake. Are you the Mr. Lewisham to whom this misguided girl refers in her letter?"
Then the air of consequence vanished again into the past from which it had arisen. Supper finished, Chaffery poured the residuum of the beer into his glass, produced a Broseley clay of the longest sort, and invited Lewisham to smoke. "Honest smoking," said Chaffery, tapping the bowl of his clay, and added: "In this country cigars sound cigars and honesty rarely meet."
Heedless of the flow of golden wisdom, he went out at once and admitted a gentleman friend of Madam Gadow, who passed along the passage and vanished down the staircase. When he returned Chaffery was standing to go. "I could have talked with you longer," he said, "but you have something on your mind, I see. I will not worry you by guessing what.
For a time the Crab engaged Chaffery, and the conversation languished. Mrs. Chaffery asked Ethel formal questions about their lodgings, and Ethel's answers were buoyant, "You must come and have tea one day," said Ethel, not waiting for Lewisham's endorsement, "and see it all."
It was Lewisham had persuaded her to delay that reassuring visit until Monday night. "One whole day of honeymoon," he insisted, was to be theirs. In his prenuptial meditations he had not clearly focussed the fact that even after marriage some sort of relations with Mr. and Mrs. Chaffery would still go on. Even now he was exceedingly disinclined to face that obvious necessity.
"There are bishops," said Chaffery, "who believe in Darwin and doubt Moses. Now, I hold myself better than they analogous perhaps, but better for I do at least invent something of the tricks I play I do do that." "That's all very well," began Lewisham. "I might forgive them their dishonesty," said Chaffery, "but the stupidity of it, the mental self-abnegation Lord!
"It does," she said, but not very loudly. "But you had met before?" said Chaffery. "At Whortley," said Lewisham. "I see," said Chaffery. "I was in I was one of those who arranged the exposure," said Lewisham. "And now you have raised the matter, I am bound to say " "I knew," interrupted Chaffery. "But what a shock that was for Lagune!"
She glanced at Lewisham, remained standing for awhile, sat down in the basket chair as if to resume some domestic needlework that lay upon the table, then rose and went back into the bedroom. Chaffery proceeded to expatiate on the transitory nature of passion and all glorious and acute experiences. Whole passages of that discourse Lewisham did not hear, so intent was he upon those roses.
"Go on," said Lewisham, with the debating-society taste for a thesis prevailing for a minute over that matter of the roses. "In youth, exercise and learning; in adolescence, ambition; and in early manhood, love no footlight passion." Chaffery was very solemn and insistent, with a lean extended finger, upon this point.
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