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"Felix ... Old Felix! It is! After these years!"

He turned round and looked up and there was old Johnnie Beaminster—Johnnie Beaminster, eighty or ninety or a hundred surely, but looking as neat and as round and as complete with his white hair and rosy unwrinkled face as he had been twenty, thirty, forty years ago! How these English people didn't change! It was, one must suppose, the lives they led or didn't lead, their baths and exercises and simple innocent minds! But Felix was delighted. There had been times, in the old past world, when he had found Johnnie Beaminster a bit of a bore, but now in this new, unfaithful, hysterical world old Beaminster was a pearl of great price, and it was a beautiful, round, shining, gleaming pearl that he looked, his smooth, good-tempered, stupid face crinkled into smiles.

"And you've been here ever so long and you've never told me. I call that too bad. You could have found me in a minute."

"No, but, Johnnie, I haven't been here so long. I'm only now settling in. I'd have bothered you soon enough. And I'm old. Mon dieu! how old! And snappy ... You don't know how snappy. I'm kind to keep out of people's path."