Club, exercises justice. Therefore the miserable waiter is rebuked in
tones of thunder because the Captain's steak is underdone, or because
Nature (or the market gardener) has not made the stalks of asparagus so
green and succulent as their charming tops. People who do not know the
scolding club-bore at home are apt to be thankful that they are not
favoured with his intimate acquaintance, and are doubly grateful that
they are not members of his family. For if, in a large and quiet room
full of strangers, a man can give loose to his temper without
provocation, and outroar the thunder, what must this noisy person do at
home? "In an English family," says a social critic, "the father is the
man who shouts." How the club-bore must shout when he is in his own
castle, surrounded only by his trembling kindred and anxious retainers!
In his castle there is no one to resist or criticise him--unless indeed
his wife happen to be a lady, like Clytemnestra, of masculine resolution.
In that case the arbitrary gent may be a father of a family who is not
allowed to shout at home, but is obliged to give nature free play by
shouting abroad.

There are plenty of other club-bores besides the man who rates these
generally affable and well-behaved persons, the club servants. One of
the worst is the man whom you never see anywhere except at the club, and
whom you never fail to see there. It is bad enough when you have no
acquaintance with him. Murders have probably been committed by sensitive
persons for no better reason (often for worse reasons) than that they are
tired of seeing some one else going about. His voice, his manner, his
cough, especially his cough, become unendurable. People who cough in
clubs are generally amateurs of the art. They are huskier, more
wheezing, more pertinacious in working away at a cough till they have
made it a masterpiece than any other mortals. We believe that club
Asthmats (it is quite as good a word as "AEsthetes") practise in the