I hate people who stand on one leg when you're breakfasting, don't
you? . . . So I gave him a cigar, and he smoked it whilst I went on
eating. He said it was a first-class cigar and asked me where I
dealt. I said truthfully that it was one of yours, and falsely that
you bought them in Leadenhall Market off a man called Huggins.
I gave him the address, which he took down with a gold pencil in his
pocket-book. . . . I said they were probably smuggled, and (as I
expected) he winked at me and said he rather gathered so from the
address. He also said that he knew a good thing wherever he saw it,
that you were his _bo ideal_ of a British baronet, and that we had
very cosy quarters. This led him on to discourse of his wife, and
how lonely he felt since losing her--she had been a martyr to
sciatica. But there was much to be said for a bachelor existence,
after all. It was so free. His wife had never, in the early days,
whole-heartedly taken to his men friends: for which he couldn't
altogether blame her--they weren't many of 'em drawing-room company.
A good few of them, too, had gone down in the world while he had been
going up.
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