“I very seldom read a novel now. Here is our tea. But I know you would rather have a whisky-and-soda.” “As a rule I should, but not to-night. I want to drink what you are drinking.” “And to smoke what I am smoking?” she said, with a faintly ironic smile. “Yes--please.” She held out a box of cigarettes. The butler went out of the room. “I love this house,” said Craven abruptly. “I love its atmosphere.” “It isn’t a modern atmosphere, is it?” “Neither distinctively modern, nor in the least old-fashioned. I think the right adjective for it would be perhaps--” He paused and sat silent for a moment. “I hardly know. There’s something remote, distinguished and yet very warm and intimate about it.” He looked at her and added, almost with hardihood. “It’s not a cold, or even a reserved house.” “Coldness and unnecessary reserve are tiresome--indeed, I might almost say abhorrent--to me.” She had given him his tea and lemon and taken hers. “But not aloofness?” “You have travelled?” “Yes.” “Well, you know how, when travelling, it is easy to get into intimacies with people whom one doesn’t want to be intimate with at home.” “Yes. I know all about that.” “At my age one has learnt to avoid not only such intimacies but many others less disagreeable, but which at moments might give one what I can only call mental gooseflesh. Is that aloofness?” “I think it would probably be called so by some.” “By whom?” “Oh, by mental gooseflesh-givers!” She laughed, laughed quite out with a completeness which had something almost of youth in it. “I wonder,” he added rather ruefully, after the pause which the laugh had filled up, “I wonder whether I am one of them?” “I don’t think you are.” “And Ambrose Jennings?” “That’s a clever man!” was her reply. And then she changed the conversation to criticism in general, and to the type of clever mind which, unable to create, analyses the creations of others sensitively. “But I much prefer the creators,” she presently said. “So do I. They are like the fresh air compared with the air in a carefully closed room,” said Craven. “Talking of closed rooms, don’t you think it is strange the liking many brilliant men and women have, both creators and analysers of creators, for the atmosphere of garish or sordid cafes?” “You are thinking of the Cafe Royal?” “Yes. Do you know it?” “Don’t tell Beryl--but I have never been in it. Nevertheless, I know exactly what it is like.” “By hearsay?” “Oh, no. In years gone by I have been into many of the cafes in Paris.” “And did you like them and the life in them?”