“The interesting thing about the Uscoques,” I added, “is that they were a Co-operative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century, in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and children—­the general public, in fact, of Senga—­took shares and were paid dividends.  They were also a religious people, and the setting out of the pirate fleet at the festivals of Easter and Christmas was attended by ecclesiastical ceremony.  Then they scoured the high seas, captured argosies, murdered the crews —­their only weapons were hatchets and daggers and arquebuses —­landed on undefended shores, ravaged villages and carried off comely maidens to replenish their stock of womenkind at home.  They must have been a live lot of people.”

“What a second-hand old brigand you are,” cried Pasquale, who during my speech had been examining the carpet by the side of his chair.

I laughed.  “Hasn’t a phase of the duality of our nature ever struck you?  We have a primary or everyday nature—­a thing of habit, tradition, circumstance; and we also have a secondary nature which clamours for various sensations and is quite contented with vicarious gratification.  There are delicately fibred novelists who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by writing books whose pages reek with bloodshed.  The most placid, benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious passion for crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a musee maccabre of murderers’ relics.  From the thumb-joint of a notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions, while the blood-stains on an assassin’s knife fill him with the delicious lust of slaughter.  In the same way predestined spinsters obtain vicarious enjoyment of the tender passion by reading highly coloured love-stories.”

“Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus from this sort of thing,” said Pasquale.

And he fished from the side of his chair, and held up by the tip of a monstrous heel, the most audacious, high-instepped, red satin slipper I ever saw.

I eyed the thing with profound disgust.  I would have given a hundred pounds for it to have vanished.  In its red satin essence it was reprehensible, and in its feminine assertion it was compromising.  How did it come there?  I conjectured that Carlotta must have been trespassing in the drawing-room and dropped it, Cinderella-like, in her flight, when she heard me enter the house before dinner.

Pasquale held it up and regarded me quizzically.  I pretend to no austerity of morals; but a burglar unjustly accused of theft suffers acuter qualms of indignation than if he were a virtuous person.  I regretted not having asked Pasquale to dinner at the club.  I particularly did not intend to explain Carlotta to Pasquale.  In fact, I see no reason at all for me to proclaim her to my acquaintance.  She is merely an accident of my establishment.