wrote the weekly Letter to Clorinda, discussing the matter with Peter Hope in the editorial office of Good Humour. 'Knew a Doon who kept a big second-hand store in Euston Road and called himself an auctioneer. He bought a small place in Gloucestershire and added an 'e' to his name. Wonder if it's the same?'
'I had a cat called Elizabeth once,' said Peter Hope.
'I don't see what that's got to do with it.'
'No, of course not,' agreed Peter. 'But I was rather fond of it. It was a quaint sort of animal, considered as a cat--would never speak to another cat, and hated being out after ten o'clock at night.'
'What happened to it?' demanded Miss Ramsbotham.
'Fell off a roof,' sighed Peter Hope. 'Wasn't used to them.'
The marriage took place abroad, at the English Church at Montreux. Mr. and Mrs. Loveredge returned at the end of September. The Autolycus Club subscribed to send a present of a punch-bowl, left cards, and waited with curiosity to see the bride. But no invitation arrived. Nor for a month was Joey himself seen within the Club. Then, one foggy afternoon, waking after a doze, with a cold cigar in his mouth, Jack Herring noticed he was not the only occupant of the smoking-room. In a far corner, near a window, sat Joseph Loveredge reading a magazine. Jack Herring rubbed his eyes, then rose and crossed the room.
'I thought at first,' explained Jack Herring, recounting the incident later in the evening, 'that I must be dreaming. There he sat, drinking his five o'clock whisky-and-soda, the same Joey Loveredge I had known for fifteen years; yet not the same. Not a feature altered, not a hair on his head changed, yet the whole face was different; the same body, the same clothes, but another man. We talked for half an hour; he remembered everything that Joey Loveredge had known. I couldn't understand it. Then, as the clock struck, and he rose, saying he must be home at half-past five, the explanation suddenly occurred to me: JOEY LOVEREDGE WAS DEAD; THIS WAS A MARRIED MAN.'
'We don't want your feeble efforts at psychological romance,' told him Somerville the Briefless. 'We want to know what you talked about. Dead or married, the man who can drink whisky-and-soda must be held responsible for his actions. What's the little beggar mean by cutting us all in this way? Did he ask after any of us? Did he leave any message for any of us? Did he invite any of us to come an see him?'
'Yes, he did ask after nearly everybody; I was coming to that. But he didn't leave any message. I didn't gather that he was pining for old relationships with any of us.'
'Well, I shall go round to the office to-morrow morning,' said Somerville the Briefless, 'and force my way in if necessary. This is getting mysterious.'
But Somerville returned only to puzzle the Autolycus Club still further. Joey had talked about the weather, the state of political parties, had received with unfeigned interest all gossip concerning his old friends; but about himself, his wife, nothing had been gleaned. Mrs. Loveredge was well; Mrs. Loveredge's relations were also well. But at present Mrs. Loveredge was not receiving.
Members of the Autolycus Club with time upon their hands took up the business of private detectives. Mrs. Loveredge turned out to be a handsome, well-dressed lady of about thirty, as Peter Hope had desired. At eleven in the morning, Mrs. Loveredge shopped in the neighbourhood of the Hampstead Road. In the afternoon, Mrs. Loveredge, in a hired carriage, would slowly promenade the Park, looking, it was noticed, with intense interest at the occupants of other carriages as they passed, but evidently having no acquaintances among them. The carriage, as a general rule, would call at Joey's office at five, and Mr. and Mrs. Loveredge would drive home. Jack Herring, as the oldest friend, urged by the other members, took the bull by the horns and called boldly. On neither occasion was Mrs. Loveredge at home.
'I'm damned if I go again!' said Jack. 'She was in the second time, I know. I watched her into the house. Confound the stuck-up pair of them!'
Bewilderment gave place to indignation. Now and again Joey would creep, a mental shadow of his former self, into the Club where once every member would have risen with a smile to greet him. They gave him curt answers and turned away from him. Peter Hope one afternoon found him there alone, standing with his hands in his pockets looking out of window. Peter was fifty, so he said, maybe a little older; men of forty were to him mere boys. So Peter, who hated mysteries, stepped forward with a determined air and clapped Joey on the shoulder.
'I want to know, Joey,' said Peter, 'I want to know whether I am to go on liking you, or whether I've got to think poorly of you. Out with it.'
Joey turned to him a face so full of misery that Peter's heart was touched. 'You can't tell how wretched it makes me,' said Joey. 'I didn't know it was possible to feel so uncomfortable as I have felt during these last three months.'
'It's the wife, I suppose?' suggested Peter.
'She's a dear girl. She only has one fault.'
'It's a pretty big one,' returned Peter. 'I should try and break her of it if I were you.'
'Break her of it!' cried the little man. 'You might as well advise me to break a brick wall with my head. I had no idea what they were like. I never dreamt it.'
'But what is her objection to us? We are clean, we are fairly intelligent--'
'My dear Peter, do you think I haven't said all that, and a hundred things more? A woman! she gets an idea into her head, and every argument against it hammers it in further. She has gained her notion of what she calls Bohemia from the comic journals. It's our own fault, we have done it ourselves. There's no persuading her that it's a libel.'
'Won't she see a few of us--judge for herself? There's Porson--why Porson might have been a bishop. Or Somerville--Somerville's Oxford accent is wasted here. It has no chance.'
'It isn't only that,' explained Joey; 'she has ambitions, social ambitions. She thinks that if we begin with the wrong set, we'll never get into the right. We have three friends at present, and, so far as I can see, are never likely to have any more. My dear boy, you'd never believe there could exist such bores. There's a man and his wife named Holyoake. They dine with us on Thursdays, and we dine with them on Tuesdays. Their only title to existence consists in their having a cousin in the House of Lords; they claim no other right themselves. He is a widower, getting on for eighty. Apparently he's the only relative they have, and when he dies, they talk of retiring into the country. There's a fellow named Cutler, who visited once at Marlborough House in connection with a charity. You'd think to listen to him that he had designs upon the throne. The most tiresome of them all is a noisy woman who, as far as I can make out, hasn't any name at all. 'Miss Montgomery' is on her cards, but that is only what she calls herself. Who she really is! It would shake the foundations of European society if known. We sit and talk about the aristocracy; we don't seem to know anybody else. I tried on one occasion a little sarcasm as a corrective-- recounted conversations between myself and the Prince of Wales, in which I invariably addressed him as 'Teddy.' It sounds tall, I know, but those people took it in. I was too astonished to undeceive them at the time, the consequence is I am a sort of little god to them. They come round me and ask for more. What am I to do? I am helpless among them. I've never had anything to do before with the really first-prize idiot; the usual type, of course, one knows, but these, if you haven't met them, are inconceivable. I try insulting them; they don't even know I am insulting them. Short of dragging them out of their chairs and kicking them round the room, I don't see how to make them understand it.'
'And Mrs. Loveredge?' asked the sympathetic Peter, 'is she--'
'Between ourselves,' said Joey, sinking his voice to a needless whisper, seeing he and Peter were the sole occupants of the smoking-room--'I couldn't, of course, say it to a younger man--but between ourselves, my wife is a charming woman. You don't know her.'
'Doesn't seem much chance of my ever doing so,' laughed Peter.
'So graceful, so dignified, so--so queenly,' continued the little man, with rising enthusiasm. 'She has only one fault--she has no sense of humour.'
To Peter, as it has been said, men of forty were mere boys.
'My dear fellow, whatever could have induced you--'
'I know--I know all that,' interrupted the mere boy. 'Nature arranges it on purpose. Tall and solemn prigs marry little women with turned-up noses. Cheerful little fellows like myself--we marry serious, stately women. If it were otherwise, the human race would be split up into species.'
'Of course, if you were actuated by a sense of public duty--'
'Don't be a fool, Peter Hope,' returned the little man. 'I'm in love with my wife just as she is, and always shall be. I know the woman with a sense of humour, and of the two I prefer the one without. The Juno type is my ideal. I
