"It's maddening! What are you going to do? What do you expect us to do?
Are we to spend our whole lives getting you positions which you won't
keep? I can tell you we're... it's monstrous! It's sickening! Good God!"

And with these words the dark man, apparently feeling, as Sally had
sometimes felt in the society of her brother Fillmore, the futility of
mere language, turned sharply and stalked away up the beach, the dignity
of his exit somewhat marred a moment later by the fact of his straw hat
blowing off and being trodden on by a passing child.

He left behind him the sort of electric calm which follows the falling
of a thunderbolt; that stunned calm through which the air seems still to
quiver protestingly. How long this would have lasted one cannot say: for
towards the end of the first minute it was shattered by a purely
terrestrial uproar. With an abruptness heralded only by one short, low
gurgling snarl, there sprang into being the prettiest dog fight that
Roville had seen that season.

It was the terrier with the black patch who began it. That was Sally's
opinion: and such, one feels, will be the verdict of history. His best
friend, anxious to make out a case for him, could not have denied that
he fired the first gun of the campaign. But we must be just. The fault
was really Sally's. Absorbed in the scene which had just concluded and
acutely inquisitive as to why the shadowy Scrymgeour had seen fit to
dispense with the red-haired young man's services, she had thrice in
succession helped the poodle out of his turn. The third occasion was too
much for the terrier.

There is about any dog fight a wild, gusty fury which affects the
average mortal with something of the helplessness induced by some vast