The Doctor, meanwhile, lay in a state of perfect contentment in a hot bath filled with blue crystals. The bath was veined marble and was long enough to allow the Doctor to lie at full length. Only his quill-like face emerged above the perfumed surface of the water. His hair was filled with winking lather-bubbles; and his eyes were indescribably roguish. His face and neck were bright pink as though direct from a celluloid factory.

At the far end of the bath one of his feet emerged from the depths. He watched it quizzically with his head cocked so far upon one side that his left ear filled with water. ‘Sweet foot,’ he cried. ‘Five toes to boot and what-not in the beetroot shoot!’ He raised himself and shook the hot water gaily from his ear and began swishing the water on either side of his body.

The eyes closed and the mouth opened and all the teeth were there shining through the steam. Taking a great breath, or rather, a deep breath, for his chest was too narrow for a great one, and with a smile of dreadful bliss irradiating his pink face, the Doctor emitted a whinny of so piercing a quality, that Irma, seated at her boudoir table, shot to her feet, scattering hairpins across the carpet. She had been at her toilet for the last three hours, excluding the preliminary hour and a half spent in her bath – and now, as she swished her way to the bedroom door, a frown disturbing the powder on her brow, she had, in common with her brother, more the appearance of having been plucked or peeled, than of cleanliness, though clean she was, scrupulously clean, in the sense of a rasher of bacon.

‘What on earth is the matter with you; I said, what on earth is the matter with you, Bernard?’ she shouted through the bathroom keyhole.

‘Is that you my love? Is that you?’ her brother’s voice came thinly from behind the door.

‘Who else would it be: I said, who else would it be,’ she yelled back, bending herself into a stiff satin right angle in order to get her mouth to the keyhole.

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,’ came her brother’s shrill, unbearable laughter. ‘Who else indeed? Well, well, let us think, let us think. It might be the moon goddess, but that’s improbable, ha, ha ha; or it might be a sword swallower approaching me in my professional capacity, ha, ha, that is less improbable – in fact, my dear taproot, have you by any chance been swallowing swords for years on end without ever telling me, ha, ha? Or haven’t you?’ His voice rose: ‘Years on end, and swords on end – where will it end, if our ears unbend – what shall I spend on a wrinkled friend in a pair of tights like a bunch of lights?’