“I don’t know,” I whispered, weary after his pommelling and longing for sleep. “Pardon?” I felt myself growing hot. “Ninety-eight,” I said hoarsely, at a venture. I did not know how old James’s aunt was, nor whether she climbed. “Ah, is she so much?” he reflected, swaying on his toes. “That’s a nice little fellow” (pointing to a photograph on the mantelpiece). “Puts me in mind of Prince Olaf. It has a great look of him; don’t you think so? What?” I nodded and shook my head at the same time, and kicked the bedclothes. My temperature was rising rapidly. “Ah, thank you,” he said, as Clara came in with the hot water, and then he began washing his hands. I never knew a man use so much soap; it was my special kind at two-and-sixpence a tablet, and he left it in the water while he lathered and messed and went on with the Alpine business. He told me the names of all the mountains he had been up, and the routes by which he had unfortunately come down. He described how splendidly fit one felt tearing down the snow slopes on a toboggan (“I wish you would slide downstairs on what is left of my soap, and have done with it,” I thought). He said that he used to have a touch of bronchitis himself every winter, but it completely left him after a week at Mürren. After we had been all round Switzerland with the soap we came back to one of my favourite towels, which he reduced to something like a bread poultice during a ten minutes’ inquiry as to how many Wagner operas I had heard in my life, and whether my grandmother was the wife of a famous fisherman. I lay panting and exhausted on the bed, feeling as one does after a long afternoon spent with a garrulous and deaf old lady. Finally the wretch came back to me, fiddled with the books at my side, criticised them all, gave me a list of those he had read during the past forty years, and then got as far as the door. “Now keep quiet,” he remarked, looking down his nose at me with a judicial air, “don’t have people in here chattering.” Ill as I was, I could not take this lying down. I sat up and croaked, “What about you?” “Oh, I’ll come round to-morrow morning,” he replied, unscathed by my sarcasm. When James came home I said I was a little better and would get up. “What did you think of Smithson?” he asked. “I am told he is a clever chap.” “He’s a first-rate musician,” I said. “What?” “And Alpine climber.” “How the deuce do you know?” asked James. “He has been up the Markhorn, the Rotterham, the Bungleberg, the Sloshwald, all over Borenpest range; then in Wales, the Greater and smaller Bosh, the Gwaddear, the----” James felt my pulse and passed his hand over my forehead. “I wonder if I had better ask him to come round this evening?” he suggested.