He too turned his back upon that little pool of emotion, did his best to be natural and easy, to shut out the memory of that flaming moment.

“At twenty-nine,” he told her, “I was First Secretary at St. Petersburg.  I am afraid that I was rather a dull dog, too.  All Russia, even then, was seething, and I was trying to understand.  I never did.  No one ever understood Russia.  The explanation of all that has happened there is simply the eternal duplication of history—­a huge class of people, physically omnipotent, conscious of wrongs, unintelligent, and led by false prophets.  All revolutions are the same.  The purging is too severe, so the good remains undone.”

There followed a silence, purposeful on her port, scarcely realised by him.  She sought for means of escape, to bring their conversation down to the level where alone safety lay.  She moved her chair a little farther back into the scented chamber, as though she found the sunlight too dazzling.

“You are like so many of the men who work for us,” she said.  “You are just a little tired, aren’t you?  You come down here to rest, and I dig up all the old problems and ask you to vex yourself with them.  We must talk about slighter things.  You are going to shoot here this season—­perhaps hunt, later on?”

“I do not think so,” he answered.  “I have forgotten what sports mean.  I may take a gun out sometimes.  There is a little shooting that goes with the Manor, but very few birds, I believe.  The last ten years seem to have driven all those things out of one’s mind.”

“Don’t you think that you are inclined to take life a little too earnestly?” she asked.  “One should have amusements.”

“I may feel the necessity,” he replied, “but it is not easy to take up one’s earlier pleasures at my time of life.”

“Don’t think me inquisitive,” she went on, “but, as I told you, I have looked you up in one of those wonderful books which tell us everything about everybody.  You were a Double Blue at Oxford.”

“Racquets and cricket,” he assented.  “Neither of them much use to me now.”

“Racquets would help you with lawn tennis,” she said, “but beyond that I find that not a dozen years ago you were a scratch golfer, and you certainly won the amateur championship of Italy.”

“It is eleven years since I touched a club,” he told her.

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she declared.  “Games are part of an Englishman’s life, and when he neglects them altogether there is something wrong.  I shall insist upon your taking up lawn tennis again.  I have two beautiful courts there, and very seldom any one to play with who has the least idea of the game.”

His eyes rested for a moment upon the smoothly shaven lawns.

“So you think that regeneration may come to me through lawn tennis?” he murmured.

“And why not?  You are taking yourself far too seriously, you know.  How do you expect regeneration to come?”