I felt this to be a slight exaggeration, but said I had not been aware that the Countess’ parties were intended to be the meeting ground of minds.

“Well!” he gasped. “Frankly I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why on earth would one come otherwise?”

“Why, to drink,” I said.

Mr. Pingrey did not drink or smoke, making his abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and highly seasoned food a fetish as obstinate as a vice. He put his hand to his heart as if he had been wounded there and might, after his valedictory, topple over dead at my feet. “I cannot, I simply cannot understand this transformation in you.” His eyes, similar to Amy Brooks’ (both of them were victims of excessive thyroid secretions, a bond which strengthened their friendship, I am sure, and played a strong part in their marriage and their subsequent production of two children with the same glandular vagary), bulged forth as he bent his ruddy face down towards mine to gaze upon the frog which, before the gods had been provoked to wrath, had been a charming maiden.

“Then go on to your . . . punch bowl!” he cried, and stepped aside to let me pass. Had I lingered a few minutes longer, he would have used such words as “wassail” and “negus” and “sack” to show that his acquaintance with alcohol was purely literary. Once, at an informal luncheon, he had inquired of his hostess if her servants made the mead themselves. “Mead? What is that?” she asked. He indicated the glasses of Chablis. “Oh,” said the lady, who did not like him and was also vain of her learning, “No, my athelings have lost the receipt. This is a simple grape concoction made by the Christians in Gaul.”

I was halfway down the stairs when he leaned over the bannister and implored, “Do meet Mr. Hornblower. He wants us all to come to tea at his house tomorrow. He’s terribly anxious to meet you and says he will be ever so interested to hear your political conflicts—I told him, you see, that you were half Russian and half German.”

As the next day was Sunday, I could not go. “I will be away tomorrow,” I told him.

“Oh, but you must come,” he protested urgently, “because Mrs. Hornblower will be there too!” as though, if it were a rare thing to meet Mr. Hornblower it was an even rarer one to meet his wife. I repeated my refusal and Mr. Pingrey withdrew his head but not before he had stuck out his tongue at me like a peckish child and flung out, “Crosspatch!”