“Marie Lloyd?”
“Saint Cecilia,” said young Bingo, eyeing me with a good deal of loathing. “She reminds me of Saint Cecilia. She makes me yearn to be a better, nobler, deeper, broader man.”
“What beats me,” I said, following up a train of thought, “is what principle you pick them on. The girls you fall in love with, I mean. I mean to say, what’s your system? As far as I can see, no two of them are alike. First it was Mabel the waitress, then Honoria Glossop, then that fearful blister Charlotte Corday Rowbotham—”
I own that Bingo had the decency to shudder. Thinking of Charlotte always made me shudder, too.
“You don’t seriously mean, Bertie, that you are intending to compare the feeling I have for Mary Burgess, the holy devotion, the spiritual—”
“Oh, all right, let it go,” I said. “I say, old lad, aren’t we going rather a long way round?”
Considering that we were supposed to be heading for Twing Hall, it seemed to me that we were making a longish job of it. The Hall is about two miles from the station by the main road, and we had cut off down a lane, gone across country for a bit, climbed a stile or two, and were now working our way across a field that ended in another lane.
“She sometimes takes her little brother for a walk round this way,” explained Bingo. “I thought we would meet her and bow, and you could see her, you know, and then we would walk on.”
“Of course,” I said, “that’s enough excitement for anyone, and undoubtedly a corking reward for tramping three miles out of one’s way over ploughed fields with tight boots, but don’t we do anything else? Don’t we tack on to the girl and buzz along with her?”