Whether Doria followed the advice I am not certain. I have my doubts. Barbara has never knelt by the side of her stupid old Hilary's chair and worshipped him as a god. She is an excellent wife and I've no fault to find with her; but she has never done that, and she is the last woman in the world to counsel any wife to do it. Personally, I should hate to be worshipped. In worship hours I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a sense of congruity can imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship would bore me to paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as the new hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more he was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration he had a young Dionysian way of inhaling a cigarette--a way which Dionysus, poor god, might have exhibited, had tobacco grown with the grape on Mount Cithaeron--and a way of exhaling a cloud of smoke, holier than the fumes of incense in the nostrils of the adorer, which moved me at once to envy and exasperation. Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either in their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands than in St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of upholstered furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox on his tongue and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while Doria, chin on palm, and her great eyes set on him, drank in all the wonder of this miraculous being. I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the man." Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of view. . . . "I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking. When she has turned him into the idiot--" "She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted. "But when she finds out the idiot she has made?" "No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I. "The unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole consistency." Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but found none, the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a while and then, quickly, a smile replaced the frown. "I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she said sweetly.