“Oh no; I never eat at odd times.”

“Do you ever eat at all?”

“Yes, at my chosen moments.  Do find another excuse.”

“For going to eat?”

“Or drink.”

His reply was to sit down beside her.  Mrs. Chetwinde’s dining-room was large.  People probably knew that, for the drawing-room emptied slowly.  Even the fair young man went away to seek consolation below.  Rosamund had descended with Bruce Evelin and Esme Darlington.  There was a pleasant and almost an intimate hush in the room.

“I heard you were to be in Paris this month,” Dion said.

“I came back to-day.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No.  I want to speak to you about Jimmy, if you don’t mind.”

“Please do,” said Dion rather earnestly, struck by a sort of little pang as he remembered the boy’s urgent insistence that his visitor was to come again soon.

“I’m not quite satisfied with his tutor.”

She began to ask Dion’s advice with regard to the boy’s bringing up, explaining that her husband had left that matter in her hands.

“He’s very sorry and ashamed now, poor man, about his attacks on me, and tries to make up from a distance by trusting me completely with Jimmy.  I don’t bear him any malice, but of course the link between us is smashed and can’t ever be resoldered.  I’m asking you what I can’t ask him because he’s a weak man.”

The implication was obvious and not disagreeable to Dion.  He gave advice, and as he did so thought of Robin at ten.

Mrs. Clarke was a remarkably sensible woman, and agreed with his views on boys, and especially with his theory, suddenly discovered in the present heat of conversation, that to give them “backbone” was of even more importance than to develop their intellectual side.  She spoke of her son in a way that was almost male.

“He mustn’t be small,” she said, evidently comprehending both soul and body in the assertion.  “D’you know Lord Brayfield who was talking to me just now?”

“You mean a fair man?”

“Yes, with a meaningless mouth.  Jimmy mustn’t grow up into anything of that kind.”

The conversation took a decidedly Doric turn as Mrs. Clarke developed her ideas of what a man ought to be.  In the midst of it Dion remembered Dumeny, and could not help saying: 

“But that type”—­they had been speaking of what he considered to be Rosamund’s type of man, once described by her as “a strong soul in a strong body, and a soft heart but not a softy’s heart”—­“is almost the direct opposite of the artistic type of man, isn’t it?”

Her large eyes looked “Well?” at him, but she said nothing.

“I thought you cared so very much for knowledge and taste in a man.”

“So I do.  But Jimmy will never have knowledge and taste.  He’s the boisterous athletic type.”

“And you’re glad?”

“Not sorry, at any rate.  He’ll just be a thorough man, if he’s brought up properly, and that will do very well.”