The fact that she was entirely unacquainted with the names, and possibly the existence, of these natural philosophers did not arrest the vigorous word-painting with which she completed their portraits. “Nasty spiteful old men with whiskers,” she said, “all bunched together like so many spiders and weaving dirty cobwebs to catch their betters; of course, it’s all a conspiracy. Just because they’re all mad and hate anybody who’s quite sane.” “So you think he’s quite sane?” asked her hostess gravely. “Sane? What do you mean? Of course he’s quite sane,” retorted Margery Dale. With a mountainous magnanimity Joan was silent. Then after a pause she said: “Well, Hilary has taken his case in hand and your friend’s safe for the present; Hilary generally brings things off, however queer they sound. And I don’t mind telling you in confidence that he’s bringing that and a good many other things off, rather big things, just now. You can’t keep him from fighting whatever you do; and he seems to be out just now to fight everybody. So I shouldn’t wonder if you saw all your old gentleman’s heads knocked together after all. There are rather big preparations going on; that friend of his named Blair is for ever going and coming with his balloons and things; and I believe something will happen soon on a pretty large scale, perhaps all over England.” “Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out there?” And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly. And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand, then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near its explanation and its end. VII THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR VII THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR