As soon as Jim’s valet had handed him a small glass full of brown liquor the doorbell rang. The butler came up to tell Mr. Halpert that Mr. Howard was there to see him—and he had only enough time to deliver the bare announcement of that fact before Ryan was in the room. He cast a single glance at Jim in his chair, quirked an eyebrow, and announced with a put-upon air:

“Get up, Jim, we’re going to Brooks’s.”

Jim was unsure quite how it happened that he found himself following Ryan. Perhaps it was the exhaustion of having played a full match of cricket; perhaps it was a sense of guilt that he truly had been neglecting his friends in the aftermath of meeting Pam Beesly (not to mention pranking Dwight Schrute); perhaps it was simply the force of Ryan’s personality—his attention was rarely fully engaged, but when it was there was a depth of animal magnetism in him that could coax water out of a stone. But whatever it was, Jim found himself tossing down the drink, shrugging on his jacket, and hurrying out into the evening air. He found Ryan’s phaeton standing at the curb, a groom currying the horses, and was bundled into the carriage not quite by main force but with a great deal of alacrity on Ryan’s part. The journey to the club was short and filled mainly with the effort required to keep his seat as Ryan careened the horses around all comers. Jim was mildly disconcerted; he knew Ryan Howard to be a whip hand, but the precipitous nature of their onward journey made him worry that his friend might be at least slightly foxed, if not full three sheets to the wind.

This impression was not reduced by Ryan’s behaviour when they alighted from the phaeton and strode into the club. Brooks’s was neither the height of fashion nor a bustling hangout for busybodies, but the club was not unfull, and Ryan’s hurried progress through the rooms required Jim on more than one occasion to hurriedly mumble his apologies for his friend’s inconsiderate haste. Ryan only slowed to open the door to one of the private salons, which he hustled Jim inside, following him quickly and shutting the door. Mark looked up from a small volume that he closed with a snap and chuckled at Jim’s disconcerted face.

“So I see Ryan did find you at home.”

“Clearly. What was so urgent that it couldn’t wait?”

“He’ll have to tell you himself.”

The third party implied by this conversation was now rapidly pacing the room, as if the curious haste that had infected him from Jim’s door to the club demanded use despite the close quarters of the salon.

“Well, as he hasn’t yet, may I ask why we’re having this little conversation at Brooks’s, and not at home? If it’s just to be the three of us…”

At this Ryan gave a start, looked around the room hurriedly, and stepped out, shutting the door behind him while mumbling something that sounded like “calling Spot.” As Jim was fairly certain of Ryan’s not having a dog, he was rather confused by this somewhat unclear pronouncement, but at a gesture from Mark he sank into another of the well-upholstered chairs that ringed the edge of the salon, and accepted the evening’s paper from that worthy’s hand.

“Not sure what it is, old boy, but Howard’s in some kind of flutter, and it didn’t seem quite right not to help, especially when it’s my fault he’s in the bother in the first place.”

“Your fault?”

“Yes, well, I suppose it’s Ryan’s fault as much as anything, but if I hadn’t brought him along to laugh at your…why, dash it, Halpert, I’ve just realized, it’s all your fault! If you hadn’t made such a cake of yourself over that Beesly woman, I wouldn’t have had to bring Howard there in the first place!”

“I have not been making a cake of myself, as you so delicately put it, over Pamela Beesly. And I certainly did not ask you to come and laugh at me at Colonel Scott’s—no, nor to bring Ryan with you to share in the fun, as you call it. Besides which, you still haven’t told me what you’re blaming me for.”

“Well, my dear fellow, you can call it what you will, and I won’t argue. But you can’t deny that your interest in Miss Beesly was quite extraordinary. And I don’t regret bringing Ryan by to see it in the least. Though he made do, the poor…”

At this moment Ryan burst back into the room followed by, to Jim’s immense surprise, Colonel Scott. He and Michael had just enough time to nod to each other before Ryan burst into speech with a vehemence that took Jim by surprise, despite the intensity with which his friend had been bearing himself. The gist of his impassioned communication was that he had been finagled by Kelly to meet her parents that afternoon walking in Green Park, and that Mr. Kapoor had taken an instant dislike to him. It did not seem to Jim that this fact was of particular concern to Ryan, but rather that Kelly’s reaction to the fact—which seemed to involve alternate bursts of crying and despair on the one hand and impassioned pleas to Ryan to flee with her to Gretna Green and marry over the anvil on the other—was driving him mad. He was torn between a natural—for Ryan—disinclination to do anything impetuous or smacking of work and a strange—for him—feeling that he owed Miss Kapoor more than the affectionate indifference with which he tended to meet the demands of his amours. He ended by demanding of the somewhat surprised circle of friends he had assembled what he should do, only to shoot down in turn every suggestion they lobbed at him, from running away (with or without Miss Kapoor) to standing and fighting for her hand or withdrawing entirely from his accustomed expressions of interest in her. Only when at the last Jim suggested in utter frustration that he should just try to make up with Mr. Kapoor if he wouldn’t do anything else did he at last perk up, as apparently the idea of intentionally making himself personable to any person not of his own class or of a direct romantic interest to him was a novel conception. Upon that happy thought the charge of desperation went out of the room, and the gentlemen spent an otherwise excellent evening at the club engaged in piquet, whist, and (after the imbibing of a wide variety of alcoholic beverages of many sorts) vingt-et-un.

Jim strolled back to their rooms with Mark that night much refreshed, with an extra hundred pounds of Ryan Howard’s and Michael Scott’s money in his pocket. He should have been quite contented as he flopped into his bed for the evening well after it had transformed into a technical morning, and on the surface he was. But beneath it all he could not quite forget Mark’s words at the beginning of the evening and wonder if he had truly been making a cake of himself over Pamela Beesly.