Charteris took it round to him at the Babe's house, together with a copy of the special number.
'By Jove,' said Jim. 'Thanks awfully. Do you know, I'd absolutely forgotten all about The Glow Worm. I was to have written something for this number, wasn't I?'
And, considering the circumstances, that remark, as Charteris was at some pains to explain to him at the time, contained—when you came to analyse it—more cynical immorality to the cubic foot than any other half-dozen remarks he (Charteris) had ever heard in his life.
'It passes out of the realm of the merely impudent,' he said, with a happy recollection of a certain favourite author of his, 'and soars into the boundless empyrean of pure cheek.'