II: THE FRYING-PAN AND THE FIRE: THE DUKE OF BURMINSTER’S STORY

FROM THE BATH, IN ITS most exotic form, degenerate patrician youth passed to the coarse delights of the Circus, and thence to that parody of public duties which it was still the fashion of their class to patronise.

Von Letterbeck: Imperial Rome.

PART I—THE FRYING-PAN

Lamancha had been staying for the week-end at some country house, and had returned full of wrath at the way he had been made to spend his evenings. “I thought I hated bridge,” he said, “but I almost longed for it as a change from cracking my brain and my memory to find lines from poets I had forgotten to describe people I didn’t know. I don’t like games that make me feel a congenital idiot. But there was one that rather amused me. You invented a prepostero