18After the row overnight Ellis was looking forward to a week of baiting Flory. He had nicknamed him Nancy, short for n****r’s Nancy Boy, but the women did not know that, and was already inventing wild scandals about him. Ellis always invented scandals about anyone with whom he had quarrelled, scandals which grew, by repeated embroideries, into a species of saga. Flory’s incautious remark that Dr Veraswami was a ‘damned good fellow’ had swelled before long into a whole Daily Workerful of blasphemy and sedition.
‘On my honour, Mrs Lackersteen,’ said Ellis, Mrs Lackersteen had taken a sudden dislike to Flory after discovering the great secret about Verrall, and she was quite ready to listen to Ellis’s tales. ‘on my honour, if you’d been there last night and heard the things that man Flory
