Lady Lathkill steered heavily past me as if I didn't exist, perching rather forward, with her crest of white hair, from her big hips. She seemed abstracted, concentrated on something, as she went. I closed the door, and turned to the men. "Dans la première auberge _J'eus b'en bu_!" sang I in a little voice. "Quite right," said Lord Lathkill. "You're quite right." And we sent the port round. "This house," I said, "needs a sort of Spring cleaning." "You're quite right," said Lord Lathkill. "There's a bit of a dead smell!" said I. "We need Bacchus, and Eros, to sweeten it up, to freshen it." "You think Bacchus and Eros?" said Lord Lathkill, with complete seriousness; as if one might have telephoned for them. "In the best sense," said I. As if we were going to get them from Fortnum and Mason's, at least. "What exactly is the best sense?" asked Lord Lathkill. "Ah! The flame of life! There's a dead smell here." The Colonel fingered his glass with thick, inert fingers, uneasily. "Do you think so?" he said, looking up at me heavily. "Don't you?" He gazed at me with blank, glazed blue eyes, that had deathly yellow stains underneath. Something was wrong with him, some sort of breakdown. He should have been a fat, healthy, jolly old boy. Not very old either: probably not quite sixty. But with this collapse on him, he seemed, somehow, to smell. "You know," he said, staring at me with a sort of gruesome challenge, then looking down at his wine, "there's more things than we're aware of, happening to us!" He looked up at me again, shutting his full lips under his little grey moustache, and gazing with a glazed defiance. "Quite!" said I. He continued to gaze at me with glazed, gruesome defiance. "Ha!" He made a sudden movement, and seemed to break up, collapse and become brokenly natural. "There, you've said it. I married my wife when I was a kid of twenty." "Mrs. Hale?" I exclaimed.