Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had laughed over him for goodness knows how many years.  I, who had guessed (with Barbara’s aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt, found in his humility something pathetic which was lost to Adrian.  The latter only saw the blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews and sinews, at the mercy of anything in petticoats, from Susan upward.  I disagreed.  He was not at the mercy of Liosha.

“You burrowing mole,” cried Adrian one morning in the library, Jaffery having gone off to golf, “can’t you see that he goes about in mortal terror of her?”

“No such thing!” I retorted hotly.  “He has regarded her as an abominable nuisance—­a millstone round his neck—­a responsibility—­”

“A huntress of men,” he interrupted.  “Especially an all too probable huntress of Jaffery Chayne.  With Susan and Barbara and Doria he knows he’s safe—­spared the worst—­so he yields and they pick him up—­look at him and stand him on his head and do whatever they darn well like to him; but with Liosha he knows he isn’t safe.  You see,” Adrian continued, after having lit a cigarette, “Jaffery’s an honourable old chap, in his way.  With Liosha, his friend Prescott’s widow, it would be a question of marriage or nothing.”

“You’re talking rubbish,” said I.  “Jaffery would just as soon think of marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” said Adrian.  “He’s in a mortal funk lest his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her pedestal and with resistless hands take him away and marry him.”

“For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the day,” said I, “you seem to have very limited powers of observation.”

For some unaccountable reason Adrian’s pale face flushed scarlet.  He broke out vexedly: 

“I don’t see what my imaginative work has got to do with the trivialities of ordinary life.  As a matter of fact,” he added, after a pause, “the psychology in a novel is all imagination, and it’s the same imaginative faculty that has been amusing itself with Jaffery and this unqualifiable lady.”

“All right, my dear man,” said I, pacifically.  “Probably you’re right and I’m wrong.  I was only talking lightly.  And speaking of imagination—­what about your next book?”

“Oh, damn the next book,” said he, flicking the ash off his cigarette.  “I’ve got an idea, of course.  A jolly good idea.  But I’m not worrying about it yet.”

“Why?” I asked.

He threw his cigarette into the grate.  How, in the name of common sense, could he settle down to work?  Wasn’t his head full of his approaching marriage?  Could he see at present anything beyond the thing of dream and wonder that was to be his wife?  I was a cold-blooded fish to talk of novel-writing.

“But you’ll have to get into it sometime or other,” said I.

“Of course.  As soon as we come back from Venice, and settle down to a normal life in the flat.”