At the beginning of lunch, while Baltazar happened to be engaged in eager argument with Lady Northby, she devoted herself to Godfrey. In her sympathetic contralto she questioned him, and, under the spell of it, he answered. He would have revealed the inmost secrets of his soul, had she demanded them. As it was, he told her an astonishing lot of things about himself. Presently the talk became general. Lady Northby, in her gentle way, shed light, from the point of view of a divisional commander’s wife, on many obscure phases of the war. Lady Edna held a flaming torch over black and abysmal corners of diplomacy. Godfrey sat awed by her knowledge of facts and her swift deductions from them. He had never met a woman like her, scarcely dreamed that such a woman existed. She had been in personal touch with all the great ones of the earth, from the Kaiser upwards, and she judged them shrewdly and with a neat taste in epigram. “If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had been ordinary middle-class folk,” she said, “they would have been in gaol long ago. The father for swindling the public on a grand scale; the son for stealing milk-cans.” She had met King Constantine, then a thorn in the Allied flesh, whose sufferance for so long on the Greek throne is still a mystery to the plain Briton. “What a degradation of a name for Constantine the Great,” said Baltazar. “That’s just it,” she flashed. “His awful wife says ‘_In hoc signo vinces_,’ and dangles before his eyes the Iron Cross.” No. Godfrey had never met a woman remotely like her. She was incomparable. The talk developed quickly from the name of Constantine to names in general. The degradation of names. Uriah, for instance, that of the most tragic victim of dastardly treachery in history, now brought low by its association with Heep. “I love the old Saxon names,” said Lady Northby, with some irrelevance. “Yours, dear, for instance.” “It’s a beautiful name,” said Baltazar, “but it’s not Saxon. It’s far older.” “Surely it’s Saxon,” said Lady Edna. “Edna was the wife of Raguel and the mother-in-law of Tobias, the son of Tobit, the delightful young gentleman carrying a fish and accompanied by the Angel Raphael, whom you see in the Italian pictures.” Lady Edna was impressed. “I wonder if there’s anything you don’t know?” He laughed. “I only remember what I’ve read. My early wrestling with Chinese, I suppose, has trained my memory for detail. I’m also very fond of the Apocrypha. The Book of Esdras, for instance, is a well of wonderful names. I love Hieremoth and Carabasion.” Presently she said to Godfrey: “Your father always makes me feel so humble and ignorant. Have you ever read the Apocrypha?” “I’m afraid not.” “Neither have I. If you said you had, I should want to sink under the table. The pair of you would be too much for me.” Her confession of ignorance delighted him as much as her display of knowledge filled him with wonder. It made her deliciously human.