up, or it's you for the Golden Shore." So I set my teeth and
journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my
duodenum. They saw that the darned thing wouldn't do, so they
sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic. It
was the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of
the side of our First Parent. They've got a mighty fine way of
charging, too, for they take five per cent of a man's income, and it's
all one to them whether he's a Meat King or a clerk on twenty
dollars a week. I can tell you I took some trouble to be a very rich
man last year.'

All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor. I was trying to
assimilate the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his
heavenly drawl, and I was puzzling my head about Ivery. I had a
ridiculous notion that I had seen him before, but, delve as I might
into my memory, I couldn't place him. He was the incarnation of
the commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who
patronized pacificism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip
his hands too far. He was always damping down Blenkiron's
volcanic utterances. 'Of course, as you know, the other side have
an argument which I find rather hard to meet ...' 'I can
sympathize with patriotism, and even with jingoism, in certain
moods, but I always come back to this difficulty.' 'Our opponents are
not ill-meaning so much as ill-judging,' - these were the sort
of sentences he kept throwing in. And he was full of quotations
from private conversations he had had with every sort of person -
including members of the Government. I remember that he expressed
great admiration for Mr Balfour.

Of all that talk, I only recalled one thing clearly, and I recalled it