It had been snowing in the morning, but the sun had turned the snow to slush, and the three men, for lack of more exciting sport, were watching the omnibus horses slide and struggle down Murray Hill, and the pedestrians splash and spatter in their vain efforts to dodge the cabs and reach the curbs with unsoiled feet. If the unfortunate wayfarer happened to be a woman, and a pretty one at that, the three friends would smirk and nudge each other, as the little feet tripped daintily from puddle to puddle, or splashed her white skirts with great mud blotches, while the owner folded them about her and pattered rapidly on her heels, foolishly fancying the more speed the less mud. An occasional witticism from Rennsler's lips would heighten the grotesqueness of a luckless passer's struggles. The other two would laugh and Howard-Jones would add some strained gibe, with the flat effect that forced wit always has. Perhaps half an hour was thus passed, when Howard-Jones spied a woman leaving a house in a side street. A carriage was waiting at the curb, and a footman was vainly endeavoring to protect her feathers from the rain; but forgetting the servant and his umbrella, she gathered her skirts up frantically and rushed from the bottom step to the carriage door, which, of course being closed, left her no alternative but to stand patiently in the drenching rain until the marked precision of the footman's steps brought relief and the umbrella.
"Look at that action!" shouted Howard-Jones. "Great for park work but too high for the open. Easy, my beauty, or you will come a cropper at the curb. By Jove, fellows, it is Mrs. Harry Osgood."
"So it is," replied Waterman. "I wonder what she is mousing about that street after? She must be searching for her Duncan. Dear girl, how pathetically lonesome she looked at Sherry's last night when Grahame left her to dance with Mrs. Rossy Platt."
This remark was hailed by Howard-Jones with the world-wise chuckle with which a man of narrow sympathy and ill-spent life invariably receives a pointed insinuation against a woman's character. Broad sentiments and heroic impulses are seldom nursed in clubs, and Howard-Jones had learned his ethics within the limits of the world in which he moved.