With Mr. Thwaites nothing was ever enough.

 ‘I Hay ma Doots, that’s all . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘I Hay ma Doots . . .’

(He is not, thought Miss Roach, going to add ‘as the Scotchman said,’ is he? Surely he is not going to add ‘as the Scotchman said’?)

‘As the Scotchman said,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘Yes . . . I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said – of Yore . . .’

(Only Mr. Thwaites, Miss Roach realised, could, as it were, have out-Thwaited Thwaites and brought ‘of Yore’ from the bag like that.)

The room, which had by this time finished its soup, maintained its stupefied silence – a silence permeated and oppressed, of course, by the knowledge that Mr. Thwaites, in regard to the Russians, kept his counsel like the wise old bird, and hayed his doots as the Scotchman said of yore. If he had nothing else, Mr. Thwaites had personality in a dining-room. The maid went round quietly removing the soup-plates . . .

‘Ah, Wheel . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites, philosophically, and by some curious process of association identifying himself with the Scotchman of yore whom he had quoted. ‘Ah, Wheel . . .’

And again, as the maid replaced the soup-plates with the plates of warm spam and mashed potatoes, the room seemed to have to echo reverently Mr. Thwaites’ ‘Ah, Wheel’, and to be bathing in the infinite Scottish acumen with which it had been uttered.

‘Oh, well,’ said Mr. Thwaites a little later, briskly returning to his own race and language, and with a note of challenge, ‘we’ll all be equal soon, no doubt.’

This, clearly, was another stab at the Russians. The Russians, in Mr.