On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine.  Jaffery met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the hour before bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in which neither my wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor myself were allowed to participate.  When nurses sounded the retreat, our two Brobdingnagians appeared in the drawing-room, radiant, and dishevelled, with children sticking to them like flies.  It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side of Jaffery, unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman against physical man, with three children—­two in her generous arms and one on her back—­to his mere pair—­that I realised, with the shock that always attends one’s discovery of the obvious, the superb Olympian greatness of the creature.  She stood nearly six feet to his six feet two.  He stooped ever so little, as is the way of burly men.  She held herself as erect as a redwood pine.  The depth of her bosom, in its calm munificence, defied the vast, thick heave of his shoulders.  Her lips were parted in laughter shewing magnificent teeth.  In her brown eyes one could read all the mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood.  Her hair was anyhow:  a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins.  Her barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt.  I wanted, just for the picture, half her bodice torn away.  For there they stood, male and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern garb.  Clap a pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight suit of chain mail, moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his red sweeping moustache, his red beard, his intense blue eyes staring out of a red face; dress Liosha in flaming maize and purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a gold torque through her hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under autumn bracken; strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity—­it was an unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the Goetterdaemmerung.

I can only speak according to the impression produced by their entrance on an idle, dilettante mind.  My cousin Eileen, a smiling lady of plump unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy, could not understand it.  Speaking entirely of physical attributes, she saw nothing more in Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and considered Liosha far too big for a drawing-room.

When the children departed after an orgy of osculation, Jaffery surveyed with a twinkling eye the decorous quartette sitting by the fire.  Then in his familiar fashion, he took his companion by the arm.

“They’re too grown up for us, Liosha.  Let’s leave ’em.  Come and I’ll teach you how to play billiards.”