"By the way, this feller Gastrell who's taken my house tells me he's
fond of huntin'," the first speaker--whom I knew to be Lord Easterton, a
man said to have spent three small fortunes in trying to make a big
one--remarked. "Said somethin' about huntin' with the Belvoir or the
Quorn. Shouldn't be surprised if he got put up for this club later."

"Should you propose him if he asked you?"

"Certainly, provided I found out all about him. He's a gentleman
although he is an Australian--he told Houston and Prince he was born and
educated in Melbourne, and went to his uncle in Tasmania immediately he
left school; but he hasn't a scrap of that ugly Australian accent; in
fact, he talks just like you or me or anybody else, and would pass for
an Englishman anywhere."

Without a doubt that must be the man I had met, I reflected as the two
speakers presently sauntered out of the room, talking again of hunting,
one of the principal topics of conversation in Brooks's. I, Michael
Berrington, am a man of leisure, an idler I am ashamed to say, my
parents having brought me up to be what is commonly and often so
erroneously termed "a gentleman," and left me, when they died, heir to a
cosy little property in Northamptonshire, and with some L80,000 safely
invested. As a result I spend many months of the year in travel, for I
am a bachelor with no ties of any kind, and the more I travel and the
more my mind expands, the more cosmopolitan I become and the more
inclined I feel to kick against silly conventions such as this one at
Brooks's which prevented my addressing Lord Easterton or his friend--men
I see in the club every day I am there, and who know me quite well by
sight, though we only stare stonily at each other--and asking more