The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due east.  Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet.  My wife, with the responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow, discussed wedding preparations with Adrian.  I, to whom the quality of the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when Jaffery’s voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the discriminating nicety out of my head.  I lazily shifted my position and watched the pair.

“You’re subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic and all that,” Jaffery was saying—­his light word about an ogre at lunch was not a bad one; sitting side by side on the low parapet they looked like a vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine black-haired elf—­she had taken off her hat—­engaged in a conversation in which the elf looked very much on the defensive—­“and you’re always tracking down motives to their roots, and you’re not contented, like me, with the jolly face of things—­”

“For an accurate diagnosis,” I reflected, “of an individual woman’s nature, the blatant universalist has his points.”

“Whereas, I, you see,” he continued, “just buzz about life like a dunderheaded old bumble-bee.  I’m always busting myself up against glass panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches off.  Do you see what I’m driving at?”

Apparently she didn’t; for while she was speaking, he threw away his corona corona—­a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had religiously preserved two inches of ash on his)—­and hauled out pipe and tobacco-pouch.  I could not hear what she said.  When she had finished, he edged a span nearer.

“What I want you to understand,” said he, “is that I’m a simple sort of savage.  I can’t follow all these intricate henry Jamesian complications of feeling.  I’ve had in my life”—­he stuck pouch and pipe on the stone beside him—­“I’ve had in my life just a few men I’ve loved—­I don’t count women—­men—­men I’ve cared for, God knows why.  Do you know why one cares for people?”

She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

“The latest was poor Prescott—­he has just pegged out—­you’ll hear soon enough about Prescott.  There was Tom Castleton—­has Adrian told you about Castleton—?”

Again she shook her head.

“He will—­of course—­a wonder of a fellow—­up with us at Cambridge.  He’s dead.  There only remains Hilary, our host, and Adrian.”