sickness.

The singular-looking person, whose necessities or sense of the decencies
had, unknown to himself and to the others, put them all in motion that
day, swung round listening to the challenge to arms, as the puffy little
man's delivery of the countess's message sounded. He was respectably
clad, he thought, in the relief of his escape from the suit of clothes
discarded, and he silently followed Sir Meeson's trot to the carriage.
'Should have mistaken you for a German to-day, sir,' the latter said,
and trotted on.

'A stout one,' Woodseer replied, with his happy indifference to his
exterior.

His dark lady's eyes were kindly overlooking, like the heavens. Her fair
cousin, to whom he bowed, awakened him to a perception of the spectacle
causing the slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not
unlike the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded. At
once he was conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw
the Teuton skin on the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat,
pinched at the knees, short at the heels, showing outrageously every spot
where he ought to have been bigger or smaller. How accept or how reject
the invitation to drive in such company to Baden!

'You're decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,' the vindictive
little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the
proffered vacant place. But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him
at the steps of a certain hotel.

'Best hotel in the town!' Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta,