Now what do you think of yourself for being too nice to a susceptible girl?
I think it's immoral." They both were laughing now; several people glanced at them, smiling in sympathy.

Alderdene took that opportunity to revert to the sketch, furnishing a specimen of his own inimitable laughter as a running accompaniment to the story of Quarrier and his dog in North Carolina, until he had everybody, as usual, laughing, not at the story but at him.
All of which demonstration was bitterly offensive to Quarrier.

He turned his eyes once on Miss Landis and on Siward, then dropped them.
The hostess arose; a rustle and flurry of silk and lace and the scraping of chairs, a lingering word or laugh, and the colour vanished from the room leaving a circle of men in black standing around the table.
Here and there a man, lighting a cigarette, bolted his coffee and cognac and strolled out to the gun-room.

Ferrall, gesticulating vigorously, resumed his preprandial dog story to Captain Voucher; Belwether buttonholed Alderdene and bored him with an interminably facetious tale until that nobleman, threatened with maxillary dislocation, fairly wrenched himself loose and came over to Siward, squinting furiously.
"Old ass!" he muttered; "his chop whiskers look like the chops of a Southdown ram--and he's got the wits of one.

Look here, Stephen, I hear you fell into no end of a scrape in town--" "Tu quoque, Blinky?
Oh, read the newspapers and let it go at that!" "Just as you like old chap!" returned his lordship unabashed.