From the entrance court on the west flank of the palace came the hoot of a motor horn and the sound of voices. “There they are,” said Miss Thriplow. “I rather wish they weren’t,” he said, and sighing he straightened himself up and turned round, with his back to the view, towards the house. “It’s like heaving a great stone into a calm pool—all this noise, I mean.” Mentally cataloguing herself among the tranquil charms of evening, Miss Thriplow took the remark to be complimentary to herself. “What smashings of crystal one has to put up with,” she said. “Every other moment, if one’s at all sensitive.” Through the huge echoing saloons of the palace the sound of an approaching voice could be heard. “Calamy,” it called, “Calamy!” mounting through the syllables of the name from a low to a much higher note, not, however, through any intervals known to music, but in a succession of uncertain and quite unrelated tones. “Calamy!” It was as vague and tuneless as the call of an articulate wind. There were hurrying footsteps, a rustling of draperies. In the huge pompous doorway at the head of the steps leading down from the house to the terrace appeared the figure of Mrs. Aldwinkle. “There you are!” she called in a rapture. Calamy walked to meet her. Mrs. Aldwinkle was one of those large, handsome, old-masterish women who look as though they had been built up from sections of two different people—such broad shoulders they have, so Junonian a form; and growing from between the shoulders such a slender neck, such a small, compact and childish head. They look their best between twenty-eight and, shall we say, five and thirty, when the body is in its perfect maturity and the neck, the little head, the unravaged features seem still to belong to a young girl. Their beauty is made the more striking, the more attractive by the curious incongruousness of its components. “At thirty-three,” Mr. Cardan used to say of her, “Lilian Aldwinkle appealed to all the instinctive bigamist in one. She was eighteen in the attics and widow Dido on the floors below. One had the impression of being with two women at the same time. It was most stimulating.”