She smiled mischievously. ‘All riddles have solutions, my dear sir. The solution to my riddle is that I am quite tired of being introduced to worthy young gentlemen with no reputation. I am bored of bankers, and I am fed up with financiers, and if I have to spend the evening being nice to another high-risk insurance broker, I think I shall scream. I want to meet someone dashing, someone perverse, someone with style. I want to meet men like you. Only when I do, what happens? You tell me that all the stories about you are fabricated, and that you’re probably just as tedious and worthy as all the rest of them.’

Collis had at first been puzzled, then scandalised, then, gradually, intrigued. Delphine Spooner was a great deal more fascinating than he had first supposed, as well as being prettier. There was something about the way she spoke, about the way she held her head, that made her looks even more compelling. He reached out and laid his hand over hers, oblivious of his mother’s sideways glance, and said: ‘They’re not all lies, you know. Some of them have what you might call a grain of truth.’

Delphine’s cheeks coloured again, but she kept her composure. ‘You may think me very forward, and I must assure you that I do not normally ask questions of this nature, but have you ever been with strumpets?’

Collis didn’t know what to answer at first. Here was a girl who could be devious enough to be tricking him into an admission of immorality, so that she could decide if he was worthy of her or not. But here was a girl, too, who could be spirited and unusual enough to feel the need for a man of experience, a man well acquainted with loose women.

‘Is that what the stories say of me?’ he said cautiously.

She nodded, almost eagerly. ‘Melissa Dunlop, Lewis Dunlop’s sister, said that on one occasion you had bedded two ladies at once.’

Ida, leaning across the table with dangling earrings and rustling coffee-coloured silk, said, ‘Have you two young people found something in common, Collis?’

Collis said, ‘I think so, Mother,’ but kept his eyes on Delphine. All around them, Taylor’s burbled with conversation, and waiters hurried through the subdued light with trays of coffee and plates of oysters, but he believed, in the few minutes they had been together, that Delphine and he had grown a strange and private understanding. ‘Yes,’ he said to Delphine, pronouncing the words most carefully, ‘that’s true.’

Delphine closed her eyes. Her hand stirred under his.