“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.