Hovenden looked uncomfortably from Mr. Cardan to Calamy, hoping that one or other of them would answer for him. “We shan’t be long,” said Calamy. “The time to drink a glass of wine, that’s all. I’m not a bit tired, you know. And Cardan’s suggestion of Chianti is very tempting.” “Ah well,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, “if you prefer a glass of wine....” She turned away with a sad indignation and rustled off towards the door, sweeping the tiled floor with the train of her velvet dress. Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow, who had been lingering impatiently near the door, drew back in order that she might make her exit in full majesty. With a face that looked very gravely out of the little window in her bell of copper hair, Irene followed. The door closed behind them. Calamy turned to Mr. Cardan. “If I prefer a glass of wine?” he repeated on a note of interrogation. “But prefer it to what? She made it sound as if I had had to make a momentous and eternal choice between her and a pint of Chianti—and had chosen the Chianti. It passes my understanding.” “Ah, but then you don’t know Lilian as well as I do,” said Mr. Cardan. “And now, let’s go and hunt out that flask and some glasses in the dining-room.” Half-way up the stairs—they were a grand and solemn flight sloping gradually upwards under a slanting tunnel of barrel vaulting—Mrs. Aldwinkle paused. “I always think of them,” she said ecstatically, “going up, coming down. Such a spectacle!” “Who?” asked Mr. Falx. “Those grand old people.” “Oh, the tyrants.” Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled pityingly. “And the poets, the scholars, the philosophers, the painters, the musicians, the beautiful women. You forget those, Mr. Falx.” She raised her hand, as though summoning their spirits from the abyss. Psychical eyes might have seen a jewelled prince with a nose like an ant-eater’s slowly descending between obsequious human hedges. Behind him a company of buffoons and little hunch-backed dwarfs, stepping cautiously, sidelong, from stair to stair.... “I forget nothing,” said Mr. Falx. “But I think tyrants are too high a price to pay.” Mrs. Aldwinkle sighed and resumed her climbing. “What a queer fellow Calamy is, don’t you think?” she said, addressing herself to Miss Thriplow. Mrs. Aldwinkle, who liked discussing other people’s characters and who prided herself on her perspicacity and her psychological intuition, found almost everybody “queer,” even, when she thought it worth while discussing her, little Irene. She liked to think that every one she knew was tremendously complicated; had strange and improbable motives for his simplest actions, was moved by huge, dark passions; cultivated secret vices; in a word, was larger than life and a good deal more interesting. “What did you think of him, Mary?” “Very intelligent,” thought Miss Thriplow.