Their clipped _g_'s were carefully restored and their conversation was otherwise conducted on the highest plane.

The dropping of this superfluous final letter had become habitual with Stanley through carelessness and conformance to environment.

With Boland it was a matter of principle, practiced in a spirit of perversity, in rebellion against a world too severely regulated.
By ten in the morning the heat drove them to cover for sleep and nooning in the scanty shade of a mesquite motte.

Long before that, the two young gentlemen had arrived at an easier footing and the _g_'s were once more comfortably dropped.

But poor Boland, by this time, was ill at ease in body.