"Halo! I hate to hear you echo that cheap cynicism of George Frenside's. As long as I have a voice left to protest with I shall cry out against human savagery in all its forms." Mrs. Spear had just discovered from a humanitarian leaflet that the truffle-hunting pigs of southwestern France perform their task in muzzles, and are never permitted the least morsel of the delicacies they unearth. ("Well, I should hope not," murmured Mr. Spear, unfolding his napkin at the approach of a crab-mayonnaise, "and anyhow, in the raw state in which the poor animals would eat them, they'd probably taste like old india-rubber.") And George Frenside added, with a malicious glint behind his glasses: "What seems to me a good deal worse is the fate of the cormorants in the China seas… . You know the Chinese train them to catch fish … carry 'em on their wrists like hawks… ." "Well?" Mrs. Spear gasped, in anguished anticipation. "No cormorant is ever allowed to taste a fish—much less a mayonnaise of crab," Frenside grinned, with a side-glance at Halo.

The recollection of the little scene flashed through Halo's mind as she looked up at Vuillard's sketch of her husband. It was for the sake of her parents that she had married him; she was too honest to disguise it from herself; and whenever she saw Mr. Spear sipping his champagne critically but complacently, and Mrs. Spear, in black velvet and old lace, bending her beautiful shortsighted eyes above an appetizing dish, or lifting them to heaven in protest at some newly discovered cruelty to pigs or cormorants, Halo said to herself that it had been worthwhile. For Mrs. Spear's woes had become as purely a luxury as Mr. Spear's cigars and champagne. They could treat their indignations like pet animals, feeding them on the fat of the land till they became too bloated to be disturbing; and Halo, looking back on the hard rasping years when her parents' furious concern for the public welfare had been perpetually fed by personal worries and privations, reflected that there could hardly be a pleasnter life than that of retired reformers. "And at least now," she added, "they've stopped borrowing from Lewis; I'm almost sure they have."