Why, Euclid would have theorem’d it out for you at a glance at the trio.  You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama without a stop.  If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only to hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think ‘s the name.’

Carting shrugged.

‘Let her keep from striking, if she’s Christian,’ pursued Fenetlan, ’and if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better thing for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise the lighter, and left a wretched female soul below, with the devil’s own testimony to her attractions—­thousands in the Funds, houses in the City.  She threw the young couple together.  And my friend Victor Radnor is of a particularly inflammable nature.  Imagine one of us in such a situation, Mr. Carting!’

‘Trying!’ said the lawyer.

’The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and know the sweetness of a woman’s call to him to live.  And here’s London’s garden of pines, bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the Hesperides here!  We don’t reflect on it, Mr. Carling.’

‘Not enough, not enough.’

’I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you’re bending over the baskets.  I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter a garden.  Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck.  Well, and just the same there; and no end to the payment either.  We’re always paying!  By the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor’s dinner-table’s a spectacle.  Her taste in flowers equals her lord’s in wine.  But age improves the wine and spoils the flowers, you’ll say.  Maybe you’re for arguing that lovely women show us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to the course of time.  I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant she is.  We reconcile it, Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape’s her spirit, the flower her body.  Or is it the reverse?  Perhaps an intertwining.  But look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of woman springs up at once, proving she’s composed of them.  I was about to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs. Burman’s legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner’s pastor, the Reverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree.’

Carling murmured:  ‘The Rev. Groseman Buttermore’; and did so for something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections:  as, that he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day; which impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman; to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication here and there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.