“What a menagerie!” he said. “I don’t suppose if you searched through all England, and goodness knows there are monstrosities enough everywhere, that you’d find such a collection. The whole lot of them ought to go into Barnum’s show. Look at Granny! She would be the ‘World-famous Animated Corpse.’ She’s not alive, she’s been dead for centuries, and I’ve got some uncanny power of animating her. Is she immortal, do you think?--- an immortal corpse? Will she see us all out? I shouldn’t wonder.” Colin sat down on a bench by the yew hedge drawing Violet gently with him. “But after all she only comes on for her evening ‘turn,’” he said, “and it rather amuses me to hear her talk about Raymond. She’s almost a museum piece, isn’t she? They’ll send down from the British Museum some day, and say her case is ready for her, and they’ll put her in some room full of Anglo-Saxon remains. Really I’m rather proud of her: she’s a bore, of course, but there are worse things than bores. Aunt Hester, for instance. What an awful old woman! What a grizzly kitten! She’s prinking before the glass now, I’ll bet, because I said all the handsome young men in London were in love with her. There’s an object lesson for you, as to how not to grow old. A cocotte of sixty--I think I shall tell Nino to make love to her. She would marry him, I’m sure, if he asked her.” Colin paused, and Violet could guess what was coming next. “Yet there’s a sort of entertainment about Aunt Hester,” he said. “It amuses me to see how silly and preposterous she can be. But what about your deadly old father, darling? What can be said for Uncle Ronald?” He waited to see if Violet could find anything to say for Uncle Ronald. “Don’t bother your head over trying to find a decent point about him,” he said. “It’s so comfortable being able to talk him over quite frankly with you, because you’ve never had the slightest real feeling for him, and so I can say what’s in my mind without fear of hurting you. And probably I know him better than you, for it’s my privilege to sit over the table with him when you’ve taken the female part of the menagerie out of dinner, and to see him at his most characteristic moments. He’s really himself you know then, when I entice him out of his eclipse of sobriety, and he gets a little squiffy. He comes out then: the shadow of temperance passes off his bloated old face.” She interrupted him, still shuddering at him. “Ah, you’re dreadful!” she said. “Why do you let him get like that? You encourage him to: it amuses you in some horrible manner to see him degrade himself.”