“Indeed, I am. I’ve shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust, so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick. He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or stand on a cairn against a skyline, I’m sure he’d pot at her for the fun of the thing.” “What is his name?” asked Sir Donald. “I didn’t catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--” “Ah! He is my only son.” Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly: “Really. I wonder he hasn’t shot you long ago.” Sir Donald smiled. “Doesn’t he depress you?” added Carey. “He does, I’m sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him.” “I think Lady Holme would like him.” For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust. “Oh, I can’t think so!” he said. “Yes, yes, she would. She doesn’t care honestly for art-loving men. Her idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald. Better not let him, though. Holme’s a jealous devil.” “Totally without reason,” said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness. “No doubt. It’s part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess a Yildiz. He’s out of place in London where marital jealousy is more unfashionable than pegtop trousers.” He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go. “I hope I may see you again,” he said rather tentatively at parting. “I am to be found in the Albany.” They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently. “There’s a sensitive man,” said Carey when he had gone. “A sort of male Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they’re both worth knowing. People with that temperament who don’t use hair-dye must have grit. His son’s awful.” “And his poems?” “Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he’ll never publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and such as him, to the world.” “Lady Holmes?” “_Par exemple_. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole show the person who’s describing it quite accurately to them often knows nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did you ever know Lady Ulford?” “No.” “She was a horse-dealer’s daughter.” “Rupert!”