sprinting up Piccadilly with a dripping knife in each hand, you’ll be jolly thankful to be able to remind him that he once ate your tea and shrimps. There will be four of us—Charlotte, self, the old man, and Comrade Butt. I suppose he will insist on coming along.”
“Who the devil’s Comrade Butt?”
“Did you notice a fellow standing on my left in our little troupe yesterday? Small, shrivelled chap. Looks like a haddock with lung-trouble. That’s Butt. My rival, dash him. He’s sort of semi-engaged to Charlotte at the moment. Till I came along he was the blue-eyed boy. He’s got a voice like a foghorn, and old Rowbotham thinks a lot of him. But, hang it, if I can’t thoroughly encompass this Butt and cut him out and put him where he belongs among the discards—well, I’m not the man I was, that’s all. He may have a big voice, but he hasn’t my gift of expression. Thank heaven I was once cox of my college boat. Well, I must be pushing now. I say, you don’t know how I could raise fifty quid somehow, do you?”
“Why don’t you work?”
“Work?” said young Bingo, surprised. “What, me? No, I shall have to think of some way. I must put at least fifty on Ocean Breeze. Well, see you tomorrow. God bless you, old sort, and don’t forget the muffins.”
I don’t know why, ever since I first knew him at school, I should have felt a rummy feeling of responsibility for young Bingo. I mean to say, he’s not my son (thank goodness) or my brother or anything like that. He’s got absolutely no claim on me at all, and yet a large-sized chunk of my existence seems to be spent in fussing over him like a bally old hen and hauling him out of the soup. I suppose it must be some rare beauty in my nature or something. At any rate, this latest affair of his worried me. He seemed to be doing his best to marry into a family of pronounced loonies, and how the deuce he thought he was going to support even a