Personally I never thought Leola did badly; she offset some of the too glossy perfection of Boy. But his idea of a wife for himself would have had the beauty and demeanour of Lady Diana Manners coupled with the wit of Margot Asquith. He let me know that he had been led into his marriage by love, and love alone; though he did not say so it was clear he owed Cupid a grudge.

Only twice did I get into any sort of wrangle with them about their own affairs. The first was early in their marriage, about 1926 I think, when Boy discovered Dr Emile Coué; the doctor had been very much in the public eye since 1920, but Canada caught up with him just about the time his vogue was expiring.

You remember Dr Coué and his great success with auto-suggestion? It had the simplicity and answer-to-everything quality that Boy, for all his shrewdness, could never resist. If you fell asleep murmuring, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better,” wondrous things came of it. The plugged colon ceased to trouble, the fretful womb to ache; indigestion yielded to inner peace; twitches and trembles disappeared; skin irritations vanished overnight; stutterers became fluent; the failing memory improved; stinking breath became as the zephyr of May; and dandruff but a hateful memory. Best of all it provided “moral energy,” and Boy Staunton was a great believer in energy of all kinds.

He wanted Leola to acquire moral energy, after which social grace, wit, and an air of easy breeding would surely follow. She obediently repeated the formula as often as she could, every night for six weeks, but nothing much seemed to be happening.

“You’re just not trying, Leo,” he said one night when I was dining with them. “You’ve simply got to try harder.”

“Perhaps she’s trying too hard,” I said.

“Don’t be absurd, Dunny. There’s no such thing as trying too hard, whatever you’re doing.”

“Yes there is. Have you never heard of the Law of Reversed Effort? The harder you try, the more likely you are to miss the mark.”

“I never heard such nonsense. Who says that?”

“A lot of wise people have said it, and the latest is your Dr Coué. Don’t clench your teeth and push for success, he says, or everything will work against you. Psychological fact.”

“Bunk! He doesn’t say it in my book.”

“But, Boy, you never study anything properly. That miserable little pamphlet you have just gives you a farcical smattering of Couéism. You should read Baudouin’s Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion and get things right.”

“How many pages?”

“I don’t count pages. It’s a good-sized book.”

“I haven’t got time for big books. I have to have the nub of things. If effort is all wrong, why does Coué work for me? I put lots of effort into it.”

“I don’t suppose it does work for you. You don’t need it. Every day in every way you do get better and better, in whatever sense you understand the word “better,” because that’s the kind of person you are. You’ve got ingrained success.”