In case this sounds a bit brash coming from a seventeenyear-old stripling like me, I think you should know that even at that tender age, fortune had endowed me with far more than my share of good looks. Going back now over the family photographs of the time, I can see that I was a youth of quite piercing beauty. This is no more than a simple fact and it would be silly to pretend it wasn’t true. Certainly, it had made things easy for me in London, and I could honestly say that up to then I had not received a single snub. But I had not, of course, been playing the game for very long, and no more than fifty or sixty young birds had come into my sights.

In order to carry out the plan which the good Major Grout had put into my head, I straightaway announced to Madame Boisvain that I would be leaving first thing in the morning to stay with friends in the country. We were still standing in the hall and we had just completed the handshakes. “But Monsieur Oswald, you have only this minute arrived!” the good lady cried.

“I believe my father has paid you six months in advance,” I said. “If I am not here, you will save money on food.”

Arithmetic like that will mollify the heart of any landlady in France, and Madame Boisvain made no further protest. At seven p.m. we sat down to the evening meal. It was boiled tripe with onions. This I consider to be the second most repulsive dish in the entire world. The most repulsive dish is something that is eaten with gusto by jackaroos on sheep stations in Australia. These jackaroos— and I might as well tell you about it so that you can avoid it if ever you should go that way—these jackaroos or sheep cowboys invariably castrate their male lambs in the following barbaric manner: two of them hold the creature upside down by its fore and hind legs.