and a question of assimilation by drugs." It was stifling. It was
dumpling talk. It made me feel swelled to hear him.

One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time
came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether
too conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but
he would come wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and
gormandised round and about me while I had my lunch. He seemed
at times almost to be clinging to me. He was a bore, but not so
fearful a bore as to be limited to me; and from the first there
was something in his manner--almost as though he knew, almost as
though he penetrated to the fact that I MIGHT--that there was a remote,
exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.

"I'd give anything to get it down," he would say--"anything,"
and peer at me over his vast cheeks and pant.

Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another
buttered tea-cake!

He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopoeia," he said,
"our Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical
science. In the East, I've been told--"

He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.

I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said, "who told
you about my great-grandmother's recipes?"

"Well," he fenced.