"Oh, Mr Melville!" she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, "will you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me, teach me to be a decadent." "But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo--" Claude began, and stopped just in time. "I mean--er--" He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy. "Will you?" Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot. "Well, we might try," Claude answered doubtfully. He was remarking to himself:-- "Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't understand his aunt!" She was murmuring in her mind: "I have always heard they have no sense of humour!" III "Mr Melville, Mr Melville," cried Miss Haddon's voice towards evening on the following day, "the absinthe has arrived!" Claude came out languidly into the hall. "Has it?" he said dreamily. "Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue books--I mean the yellow books, and" (rummaging in a just-opened parcel) "yes, here are two novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those rose-tipped cigarettes. Now, what ought I to do? Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea, or what?" Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion, but her grey hair crowned an eager face decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion was lulled to rest. "We had better have our tea," he answered slowly. "I like my absinthe about an hour or so before dinner." "Very well. Tea, James, and muffins." The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon regarded him expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming, "What's to be done now?" The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct it. "Please try to be a little--a--" "Yes?" "A little more restrained," he said. "What we feel about life is that it should never be crude. All extremes are crude." "What--even extremes of wickedness?" He hesitated.