“How _perfectly_ dreadful!” sympathized Cicely—little humbug! who, only last year, used to mark her favourite pictures in the Academy Catalogue. I do hate a girl’s tastes to be mere echoes of the man she’s with! “And those ruined castles; they’re really almost too priceless to be true,” enlarged Sydney. “Turrets like this”—he zig-zagged with a finger in the air, while a gold curb bracelet chinked at his slim wrist—“reflected, wherever possible, in water. Terrible! I mean, you simply _have_ to laugh! You feel the landscape transforming itself into wings and a drop-scene before your eyes! And the ‘Elephant Mountain’ that they insist on pointing out to you, because it really _is_ so like an elephant’s back! (Such an attraction!). And then those _meaty_ pink clouds that they always contrive to get so symmetrically posed _just_ behind the summit of Snowdon! Snowdon itself is so hopelessly banal that it only just falls short of perfection. Excruciating! Cader Idris, now, is a little better,” he went on kindly. “It is still possible to introduce Cader to one’s friends. Cader, with that quaint lake they have there, remains quite an attractive mountain, I think”—turning to Mr. Waters, who still looked as if _he_ couldn’t think of anything to say to this person who patted the Welsh mountains, so to speak, on the head. “We aren’t going to be among the mountains,” he announced briefly. “My people generally settle for six weeks or so in Anglesey.” “Not really? How amusing—I mean, it’s really possible to ‘settle’ there?” said Sydney Vandeleur, lifting his dark Vandyke beard from his tie—heavens, what a tie! I’d only just noticed that. “One had always looked upon Anglesey as a sort of straight line leading to the North Wall.” “H’m,” said the Governor, who, having checked a “Can-such-things-be?” start, was obviously trying to keep his eyes off that tie of Sydney’s: a bunch of amber silk, patterned with blatant little splashes of scarlet, black, magenta, emerald-green.... Futurist, I presume. How could I ever, ever have dreamt that life, even in Ballycool Castle, could have been tolerable with a man who wore ties like that? I should have left him in a week. No! I’m sure I should never have been there to leave him. I couldn’t.... Sydney lighted another cigarette, and the conversation languished. _Nobody_ spoke. In the middle of this sickening sag to the talk I had an inspiration! I thought, since both these young men sing and one of them composes, that it would be at this juncture a bright thought to introduce the subject of music. Why did I do it? It was distinctly what Jack calls “a wash-out.” For Sydney Vandeleur at once switched off on to Eleventh Century folk-songs. And Mr. Waters, asked if he didn’t think they were too delicious, was “afraid the Eleventh Century was out of his groove.” And then Sydney hummed several only slightly more modern Celtic dirges—one about “The Sweet Flowers, all gone to Decay!”