There were two or three living rooms on the surface of the ground.  Walking through the first of these you clambered down some slippery stairs into what was once a breathless subterranean vault hewn out of the soft and dry pumiceous rock and used, as was customary, for storing barrels and other paraphernalia.  In the course of time, as more barrels accumulated, the grotto was excavated further and further into the entrails of the island.  There seemed no reason why it should ever cease growing when suddenly, one day, the perspiring workmen were struck in the face by a cool blast of wind laden with marine moisture.  They knew what this meant.  They had encountered one of those mysterious and dangerous fissures that lead down to unknown depths, opening upon the world of sunshine often at the water’s edge, four hundred feet below.  It was deemed prudent to suspend excavations.  These rents in the interior of the earth had a knack of enlarging themselves, without a word of warning, from cracks of a few inches to black gulfs several hundred feet across.  The cavern ceased to grow.  As a matter of fact, it turned out to be just large enough.

That current of air ventilating the grotto made the fortune of these orphan girls—­Luisella and her three sisters.  The barrels and other lumber once removed, the recess became a breezy night-tavern, its natural vaulting being first whitewashed and then adorned, by master-hand, with thrilling pictures of crimson fish afloat upon caerulean waves, and piles of bossy pumpkins, and birds of Paradise with streaming golden feathers, and goats at pasture among blue lilies, and horses prancing over emerald mountains, and trees laden with flowers and fruits such as no mortal had ever seen or tasted.  It was an ideal place for a carousal.

They could cook, those girls.  Their savoury stews and vegetable soups and FRITTURAS of every description were known far and wide.  It was universally agreed that nobody could make a more appetizing mayonnaise sauce for cold fish and lobsters.  No mayonnaise was quite like theirs; no, not quite.  Its flavour lingered on the palate; it haunted your memory in distant lands, like the after-glow of some happy love-affair.  Nice girls, too; well-mannered; not very difficult to caress, and never jealous of each other.  “It’s all in the family,” they used to declare.

“Am I right, then, or am I wrong?” asked Mr. Keith, whose pomposity was melting away under successive bottles of his own wine, specially imported to grace the table.

The honest Vice-President of the Club, Mr. Richards, was pretty far gone, but could always be relied upon to say something opposite.  That was due to his legal training.  Once a thriving solicitor, he had been struck off the rolls in consequence of some stupid trustee business which turned out all wrong and thereafter driven along devious paths known only to himself:  hence his residence on Nepenthe.  He replied: