*    *    *    *    *

"Do you know," said a thoughtful Bean, "I'll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has loved
were placed end to end - not that I suppose one could do it - they would reach half-way down Piccadilly."
"Further than that," said the Egg. "Some of them were pretty tall."

*    *    *    *    *

Upon which, she gave him a sort of push and he gave her a sort of push, and she giggled and he
laughed like a paper bag bursting, and she gave him a kind of shove and he gave her a kind of
shove, and she said "You are a silly ass!" and he said "What ho!" All of which shows you,
I mean to say, the stage they had got to by this time. Nothing definitely settled, of course,
but Love obviously beginning to burgeon in the girl's heart.

*    *    *    *    *

She was one of those tall, rangy, Queen Elizabeth sort of women,
with tight lips and cold, blanc-mange-y eyes.

*    *    *    *    *

If it was Sir Mortimer's intention to spend the remainder of the night flashing past like
a merry-go-round, there seemed little hope of anything amounting to a genuine rapprochement.

*    *    *    *    *

The girl Dahlia during these exchanges had been sitting on a sofa at the end of the room, turning the
pages of a weekly paper, and the sight of her drew Freddie like a magnet. Her womanly sympathy was
just what he felt he could do with at this juncture. Treading with infinite caution, he crossed
to where she sat: and, having scanned the terrain narrowly for cats, sank down on the sofa at her side.
And conceive his agony of spirit when he discovered that womanly sympathy had been turned off at the
main. The girl was like a chunk of ice-cream with spikes all over it.

*    *    *    *    *

Freddie looked at the dog. The dog looked at Freddie. The situation was fraught with embarrassment.
A glance at the animal was enough to convince him that it had got an entirely wrong angle on the
position of affairs and was regarding him purely in the light of an intrusive stranger who had
muscled in on its private sleeping quarters. Its manner was plainly resentful. It fixed Freddie
with a cold, yellow eye and curled its upper lip slightly, the better to display a long, white
tooth. It also twitched its nose and gave a sotto-voce imitation of distant thunder.

*    *    *    *    *

A moment later, Freddie's blood was chilled by a series of fearful shrieks that seemed to ring
through the night like the dying cries of the party of the second part to a first-class murder.
It amazed him that a mere Peke, and a juvenile Peke at that, should have been capable of producing
such an uproar. He says that a Baronet, stabbed in the back with a paper-knife in his library,
could not have made half such a row.

*    *    *    *    *