“It doesn’t except indirectly.”

Anthony gazed at him more in sorrow than in anger.

“You ought to do something about this, James,” he said. “Take a correspondence course, or something. If you’d told a story like this in the good old Eastern days, you’d have been hung up by the heels and bastinadoed or something equally unpleasant.”

Jimmy pursued his course quite unmoved by these strictures.

“Ever heard of Count Stylptitch?”