white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof.  Why was he so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a good time?  It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment, that poets feel:  that Milton had felt when he wrote “Comus” about somebody for whom he probably wouldn’t have mixed a toddy, that she herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect crescent above the funeral flame of the day.  People would call it a piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed towards the disagreeable.  She remembered how the neighbours had all respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood.  “Tits, tits, puir body!” they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick.  She preferred the impersonal pang.  It was right.  Right as the furniture in the Chambers Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern’s window in Princes Street were, as this stranger was.  And it had a high meaning too.  It was evoked by the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by intimations that no motion is perpetual and that death is a part of the cosmic process.  It had the sacred quality of any recognition of the truth....

Well, he was telling them how he had gone up to de Cayagun, and they had knocked up a notary and made him draft a deed of sale, which he had posted to his agents without reading.  He had only the vaguest idea how much money had changed hands.  Mr. Philip shook his head and chuckled knowingly, “Well, Mr. Yaverland, that is not how we do business in Scotland,” and suggested that it might be wise to retain some part of the property:  the orange grove, for instance.  At that Yaverland was silent for a moment, and then replied with an august, sweet-tempered insolence that he couldn’t see why he should, since he wasn’t a marmalade fancier.  “Besides, that’s an impossible proposition.  It’s like selling a suburban villa and retaining an interest in the geranium bed....”  In the warm, interesting atmosphere she detected an intimation of enmity between the two men; and it was like catching a caraway seed under a tooth while one was eating a good cake.  She was disturbed and wanted to intervene, to warn the stranger that he made Mr. Philip dizzy by talking like that.  And the reflection came to her that it would be sweet, too, to tell him that he could talk like that to her for ever, that he could go on as he was doing, being much more what one expected of an opera than a client, and she would follow him all the way.  But it struck her suddenly and chillingly that she had no reason to suppose that he would be interested.  His talk was in the nature of a monologue.  He showed no sign of desiring any human companionship.