How on earth, I was wondering, could I cast the name of Mrs. Storm before my host with even a tolerable hope of his more than grunting at it? For, of course, one never discussed women with Hilary. I believe he had been a member of several clubs once upon a time, but in these degenerate days he had finally withdrawn into the impenetrable fortress of the Marlborough; Guy and he agreeing that, since it was once said of a King of Spain that he had died of etiquette, they envied rather than cared to overlook their young friends in the exercise of the long lives assured to them. “He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said, absently enough. And, indeed, never but once had I ever heard Hilary expand at the mention of a woman’s name, and that was when I had provoked him by defending her, the lady in question being one for whom he had a great regard but who had, as they say very aptly in the popular phrase, “gone completely off the rails.” As regards Iris, in that case, it should be child’s work. Hilary says now that he was able, so soon as I mentioned her name, to account for my subdued air. Such, Hilary says, was the aftermath of Iris’s effect on men. But all he said at the time was, snappy like, that he hadn’t even known she was in London and would I have port or brandy or both, because I was detaining them at my side of the table? I said I was sorry and how amiable Mrs. Storm had been about him. “And fancy,” I said, “her being Gerald’s twin sister!” “Why ‘fancy’?” Hilary was annoyed. Now why was Hilary annoyed? Why do men get annoyed? “She is beautiful,” I said, “she is good, she is----” “It seems to me,” snapped Hilary, “that they make a perfectly harmonious pair of twins. Hm.” And he lit a cigar and reflected profoundly on the flame of the match. Perhaps I had better leave out his “hm’s.” “There’s only one March,” he said, pushing a cup of coffee towards me as though he hated the sight of it, “who has ever been any good, and that’s the aunt, Eve Chalice, a dear old lady. Heavens above, the March blood! But they will be near their last gasp now, with young Gerald as the heir....” It just showed, you know, how much one ever knew about that young man. I had no idea he was heir to anything, let alone the bankrupt earldom. “Ever since last July,” said Hilary, “when his uncle, Barty’s elder brother by a year, and his cousin thought they would do some fifth-rate mountaineering in Switzerland without a guide, and tried by mistake to climb the Jungfrau.” Hilary, I remember thinking, seemed very bitter about that mountaineering. You know, that bitterness of a calm, normal, reasonable air, with a slight flavour of old-world banter? He seemed to want to give the impression that he rather gloated than otherwise over the decline and fall of the house of Portairley. Gerald, as the nineteenth earl, Hilary seemed to want to say, served the house of Portairley right. If Hilary could only have seen his own kind grey eyes!