By the garden’s far wall, she drew him up a moment before one piece she found particularly pleasing. It was a small stone Madonna, set under the rose bushes. At least that’s what she thought it was. Time and rain had eroded nearly all its features. Only the sweet sweep of the mantle remained around the head, and the graceful gothic S-curve of the figure. Daughter and father stood looking down at it, hand in arm.

“He really must’ve got under your skin this morning,” said Sophia, “if we’re going to blame him for both the Chinese and the Americans in one sentence.”

The Great Man gravely pressed his great chin against his great chest to suppress a smile. “You probably think I’m an old fart,” he said. “Well, I am an old fart. I’m in the very prime of my old fartdom. I’ve earned it. I won’t let it be taken away from me.”

Sophia laughed once, laid her head against him. What she thought was: There was more blood and spirit in him than in half a dozen Peters. She thought he was worth revolving around.

“You know, I remember standing in London on a bomb site once,” he said, and Sophia was glad because she always liked this story. “I couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. And there was a real, old-fashioned pea-soup fog on, covering everything. Everywhere, all you could see were just jagged shapes jutting out of the fumes. Hollowed window frames staring like eyes. Skewed doorways opening up onto nothing. Rubble. A moonscape. This acid smell. And this unnatural silence all around, as if the world had simply disappeared.”

They turned and began walking slowly back up the path towards the house.

“And I had a vision standing there,” Sir Michael said. “And I realized that the world I knew was over, that the best of civilization was done. Europe was sick of itself and done. Its will to greatness was spent. And I thought to myself: There will be no more Raphaels, not ever. No paintings worthy of him, ever again. There’ll be no more great operas written or symphonies composed. No odes like Keats’s odes, no plays like Shakespeare’s. Never. People will forget how to love them, I thought. They’re already forgetting. They’re learning to love smaller things, baser things, and they’re becoming smaller, baser things themselves. One day they’ll squat in circles on the ground and hold the relics of the old treasures in their hands and they’ll grunt to one another and say, ‘What was this? Who thought that this was good?’ Like apes gawking at a broken lyre.”