“Allow me to introduce,” said Coleman. “The sharer of my joys and sorrows. _La compagne de mes nuits blanches et de mes jours plutôt sales._ In a word, Zoe. _Qui ne comprend pas le français, qui me déteste avec une passion égale à la mienne, et qui mangera, ma foi, des rognons pour faire honneur au physiologue._” “Have some Burgundy?” Gumbril proffered the bottle. Zoe nodded and pushed forward her glass. She was dark-haired, had a pale skin and eyes like round blackberries. Her mouth was small and floridly curved. She was dressed, rather depressingly, like a picture by Augustus John, in blue and orange. Her expression was sullen and ferocious, and she looked about her with an air of profound contempt. “Shearwater’s no better than a mystic,” fluted Mr. Mercaptan. “A mystical scientist; really, one hadn’t reckoned on that.” “Like a Liberal Pope,” said Gumbril. “Poor Metternich, you remember? Pio Nono.” And he burst into a fit of esoteric laughter. “Of less than average intelligence,” he murmured delightedly, and refilled his glass. “It’s only the deliberately blind who wouldn’t reckon on the combination,” Lypiatt put in, indignantly. “What are science and art, what are religion and philosophy but so many expressions in human terms of some reality more than human? Newton and Boehme and Michelangelo—what are they doing but expressing, in different ways, different aspects of the same thing?” “Alberti, I beg you,” said Gumbril. “I assure you he was the better architect.” “_Fi donc!_” said Mr. Mercaptan. “San Carlo alle Quatro Fontane——” But he got no further. Lypiatt abolished him with a gesture. “One reality,” he cried, “there is only one reality.” “One reality,” Coleman reached out a hand across the table and caressed Zoe’s bare white arm, “and that is callipygous.” Zoe jabbed at his hand with her fork. “We are all trying to talk about it,” continued Lypiatt. “The physicists have formulated their laws, which are after all no more than stammering provisional theories about a part of it. The physiologists are penetrating into the secrets of life, psychologists into the mind. And we artists are trying to say what is revealed to us about the moral nature, the personality of that reality, which is the universe.” Mr. Mercaptan threw up his hands in affected horror. “Oh, _barbaridad, barbaridad_!” Nothing less than the pure Castilian would relieve his feelings. “But all this is meaningless.”