One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of creatures--poor little darling guinea-pigs. She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared. "No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?" He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank. But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You know perfectly well the Chows are pets." "Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never heard of keeping guinea-pigs." "'Keeping them'--I used to have them to play with; but you know quite well you don't mean to 'keep' them." "Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever." Of course she hadn't been able to keep them beyond their natural span. "But I never did anything horrible to them." Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed. Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only a child." But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said, that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the dogs such whippings as you do." Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now and then, they'd get out of hand. "Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For _your_ pleasure. And profit. Not theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to keep them? In hutches, or in enclosures in the field. Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said. "I shall just notice how long you keep them." "Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."