“Nothing,” said Robin with spirit. “Without the word of a lie you’re a hopeless crew.”

“Do you remember a conversation we had years ago on the slope of Little Mount Silver?”

“Yes.”

“So do I. And here I am still without a job. I daresay it would have been a good thing if Uncle G. had lived to chortle at our bankruptcy. It would take a major disaster to cure us. Perhaps when the war comes it will do the trick. Kill, as they say, or cure.”

“I expect you’ll manage to slope through a war in the same old way. But don’t you call this a major disaster?”

“I suppose so. But you know, Robin, somehow or another, although I feel very bothered and frightened, I don’t, inside myself, think that any of us are bound for the dock.”

“Oh don’t. How can you gossip away about it!”

“It’s not affectation. I ought to be in a panic but I’m not. Not really.”

The taxi carried them into Hyde Park Corner. Roberta looked up through the window and saw the four heroic horses snorting soundlessly against a night sky, grandiloquently unaware of the less florid postures of some bronze artillerymen down below.

“We shan’t be long now,” said Henry. “I can’t tell you how frightful this house is. Uncle G.’s idea of the amenities was a mixture of elephantine ornament and incredible hardship. The servants are not allowed to use electricity once the gentry are in bed so they creep about by candlelight. It’s true, I promise you. The house was done up by my grandfather on the occasion of his marriage and since then has merely amassed a continuous stream of hideous objets d’art.”

“I read somewhere that Victorian things are fashionable again.”

“So they are, but with a difference. And anyway I think it’s a stupid fashion. Sometimes,” said Henry, “I wonder if there is such a thing as beauty.”

“Isn’t it supposed to exist only in the eye of the beholder?”

“I won’t take that. There are eyes and eyes. Fashion addles any true conception of beauty. There’s something inherently vulgar in fashion.”

“And yet,” said Roberta, “if Frid dressed herself up like a belle of 1929 you wouldn’t much care to be seen with her.”

“She’d only be putting her fashion back eleven years.”

“Well, what do you want? Nudism? Or bags tied round the middle?”

“You are unanswerable,” said Henry. “All the same…” and he expounded his ideas of fashion, giving Roberta cause to marvel at his detachment.

The taxi bucketed along Park Lane and presently turned into a decorous side-street where the noise of London was muffled and the rows of great, uniform houses seemed fast asleep.

“Here we are,” Henry said. “I think I’ve enough to pay the taxi. How much is it? Ah yes, I can just do it with the tip. So that’s all hotsy-totsy. Come on.”

As Henry rang the front doorbell, Roberta heard a clock chime and strike a single great note.