Yes, the temptation of the expedition was not to be withstood, and for vows and renunciations there was always time!... And now leaning idly on his window ledge in a spare room of the Embassy, while his man unpacked, he felt, as he surveyed the distant dome of the Blue Jesus above the dwarf-palm trees before the house, half-way to the East already. He was suffering a little in his dignity from the contretemps of his reception, for having arrived at the Embassy among a jobbed troop of serfs engaged for the night, Lady Something had at first mistaken him for one: “The cloak-room will be in the Smoking-room!” she had said, and in spite of her laughing excuses and ample apologies, he could not easily forget it. What was there in his appearance that could conceivably recall a cloak-room attendant--? _He_ who had been assured he had the profile of a “Rameses”! And going to a mirror he scanned, with less perhaps than his habitual contentment, the light, liver-tinted hair, grey narrow eyes, hollow cheeks, and pale mouth like a broken moon. He was looking just a little fatigued he fancied from his journey, and really, it was all his hostess deserved, if he didn’t go down. “I have a headache, Mario,” he told his man (a Neapolitan who had been attached to almost as many professions as his master). “I shall not leave my room! Give me a kimono: I will take a bath.” Undressing slowly, he felt as the garments dropped away, he was acting properly in refraining from attending the soirée, and only hoped the lesson would not be “lost” on Lady Something, whom he feared must be incurably dense. Lying amid the dissolving bath crystals while his man-servant deftly bathed him, he fell into a sort of coma, sweet as a religious trance. Beneath the rhythmic sponge, perfumed with _Kiki_, he was St Sebastian, and as the water became cloudier and the crystals evaporated amid the steam, he was Teresa ... and he would have been, most likely, the Blessed Virgin herself, but that the bath grew gradually cold. “You’re looking a little pale, sir, about the gills!” the valet solicitously observed, as he gently dried him. The Hon. ‘Eddy’ winced: “I forbid you ever to employ the word gill, Mario,” he exclaimed. “It is inharmonious, and in English it jars; whatever it may do in Italian.” “Overtired, sir, was what I meant to say.” “Basta!” his master replied, with all the brilliant glibness of the Berlitz-school. Swathed in towels, it was delicious to relax his powder-blanched limbs upon a comfy couch, while Mario went for dinner: “I don’t care what it is! So long as it isn’t--”(naming several dishes that he particularly abhorred, or might be “better,” perhaps, without)--” And be sure, fool, not to come back without Champagne.” He could not choose but pray that the Ambassadress had nothing whatever to do with the Embassy cellar, for from what he had seen of her already, he had only a slight opinion of her discernment.