Dikon was in a quandary. If Gaunt was forced to acknowledge the authorship of the present to Barbara, his fury against Questing would be brought out in stronger relief, an unpleasant development. Dikon scolded, ridiculed, and pleaded. Barbara listened quietly and at last promised that she would say nothing of the dress without first telling him of her intention. ‘Though I must say,’ she added, ‘that I can’t see why you’re getting into such a tig over it. If, as you say, it’s completely irrelevant, it wouldn’t matter much if I did tell them.’

‘You might put some damn-fool idea into their thick heads. The mere fact of you lugging the wretched affair into the conversation would make them think there was something behind it. Let it alone, for pity’s sake. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.’

He kept her with him a little longer. He had an idea that she’d substituted this nonsense about the dress for a more important discussion which, at the last moment, she had funked. He saw her look unhappily at the door into Gaunt’s rooms. At last, twisting her hands together, she said very solemnly: ‘I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience, haven’t you?’

‘I must say you do astonish me,’ cried Dikon. ‘What sort of experience? Do you imagine I’m dyed deep in strange sins?’

‘Of course not,’ said Barbara, turning pink. ‘I meant you must have had a good deal of experience of the Artistic Temperament.’

‘Oh, that. Well, yes; we come at it rather strong in our line of business, you know. What about it?’

Barbara said rapidly: ‘People who are very sensitive—’ she corrected herself—‘I mean, highly sensitized, are terribly vulnerable, aren’t they? Emotionally they’re a skin short. Sort of. Aren’t they? Things hurt them more than they hurt us.’ She glanced doubtfully at Dikon. ‘This,’ he thought, ‘is pure Gaunt; a paraphrase, I shouldn’t wonder, of the stuff he sold her while I was sweating up that mountain.’

‘I mean,’ Barbara continued, ‘that it would be wrong to expect them to behave like less delicately adjusted people when something emotionally disintegrating happens to them.’

‘Emotionally…?’

‘Disintegrating,’ said Barbara hurriedly. ‘I mean you can’t treat porcelain like kitchen china, can you?’

‘That,’ said Dikon, ‘is the generally accepted line of chat.’

‘Don’t you agree with it?’

‘For the last six years,’ said Dikon cautiously, ‘part of my job has been to act as a shock absorber for temperaments. You can’t expect me to go all dewy-eyed over them at my time of life. But you may be right.’

‘I hope I am,’ said Barbara.