Two hours later they set off for Tittingham—Jeanie to blast the budding fabric, Dulcibella to visit remembered darlings among the tradespeople and read to them from Psychopathia Sexualis. Aubrey was so negligently invited to be one of the expedition that it was quite easy to decline. He would know all about it soon enough, he said to himself. Fortunately, there was Corsica. Yet it was hard to be exiled to goat and garlic just when he had discovered how very well Mrs Trumper could cook. Hopkins, too, had never shown himself so efficiently humane. The car had no sooner snorted out of earshot than he was at Aubrey’s elbow with a strong brew of Indian tea, saying that Primrose had been told to make up two beds for the ladies, and that if that Mr Leo should arrive, Primrose’s mother was ready for him.

‘Hopkins, would you like to visit Corsica?’

‘If it should come to that, sir, I’d have no objection.’

Hopkins closed the door, but not before Aubrey overheard peals of laughter from the back of the house. Hopkins, Mrs Trumper and Primrose, at any rate, were enjoying this incursion as a heaven-sent harlequinade.

A little before ten they returned for dinner. They were a trifle late, as Dulcibella informed him. She had been showing Jeanie ruined tin-mines by moonlight, and on Bodmin Moor they had remembered toothbrushes. A relation of all the things that had been shown to Jeanie took up the first half of dinner. When Jeanie inserted herself into the conversation, it was to ask, ‘Where are we going to thleep?’168

‘Here, I suppose,’ said Aubrey, and looked at his watch as brazenly as though he were in a railway station. His day had been laid waste by harpies, and in twelve hours’ time they would be expecting breakfast, having left hairs in his bath and cigarette burns on the spare-room carpet. Such uninvited circumstances would justify any host in behaving as though he were in a railway station. Then a small salvaging impulse traversed his total resentment: he rather wanted to hear what had happened in Tittingham. So he sheathed his voice in politeness, and added, ‘I hope so.’ Luckily, Dulcibella had been too busy with menhirs to hear him tartly supposing. From menhirs to Druids, from Druids to erroneous assumptions about Mopselling Maidens, he would guide her to Miss Foale. He had just clutched a Druid when the telephone rang. Hopkins came in with a look of happy expectancy and said that Sir Leopold Pirkheimer was on the telephone and wished to speak to Miss Tregurtha.

As she left the room, Jeanie leaned back in her chair, shut her eyes, and began to fall asleep. It was a shame to wake the poor little wretch, but Aubrey reflected that even the most involuntary guest owes something to even the most involuntary host.

‘Now, tell me all about this afternoon. How did things go off?’

‘Oh, we thaw thome thweet people, and they all theemed very pleathed.’