“No, sir.”

“Very good,” said Fledgeby, plainly seeing that she did. “My compliments to her. Goodbye!”

They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering. Fledgeby saw him into the fog, and, returning to the fire and musing with his face to it, stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.

“You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,” murmured Fledgeby, “and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,” here he rubbed the places where they were due, “and no manners, and no conversation!”