I want a good quiet time, with no female women about save Barbara and my fairy grasshopper whom, as you know, I love to distraction." "But will Euphemia be all right with her ?" I had not the faintest notion what kind of a creature the "problem" was.
"Right as rain.

Euphemia has fixed up to take her to-morrow night to a lecture on Tolstoi at the Lyceum Club, and to the City Temple on Sunday.
Ho! ho! ho!" His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone system of Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and merciless.
Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been allowed to converse further I might have told him that another female woman, Doria Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he might not have come.
Jaffery was always a queer fish where women were concerned.

Not a chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean fish, now hot, now cold.

I have seen him shrink like a sensitive plant in the presence of an ingenue of nineteen and royster in Pantagruelian fashion with a mature member of the chorus of the Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly, a scared Joseph, from the allurements of the charming wife of a Right Honourable Sir Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a furnace in front of an obdurate little milliner's place of business in Bond Street.
I do not, for the world, wish it to be supposed that I am insinuating that my dear old Jaffery had no morals.

He had--lots of them.