“I remember meeting a Sicilian poet,” said Miss Thriplow, who had invented this successor of Theocritus on the spur of the moment, “who said just the same. Only he preferred Manchester. _Bellissima_ Manchester!” She turned up her eyes and brought her hands together with a clap. “He was a specimen in that glorious menagerie one meets at Lady Trunion’s.” That was a good name to drop casually like that. Lady Trunion’s was one of the salons where Nature’s Guardsmen and Guardswomen encountered the funnies and the fuzzy-wuzzies—in a word, the artists. By using the word “menagerie,” Miss Thriplow put herself, with Calamy, on the Guardsmen’s side of the bars. But the effect of the talismanic name on Calamy was not what she had expected. “And does that frightful woman still continue to function?” he said. “You must remember I’ve been away for a year; I’m not up to date.” Miss Thriplow hastily readjusted the expression of her face, the tone of her voice. Smiling with a knowing contempt, she said: “But she’s nothing to Lady Giblet, is she? For real horrors you must go to her. Why, the house is positively a _mauvais lieu_.” She moved her jewelled hand from side to side with the gesture of a connoisseur in horror. Calamy did not entirely agree. “Vulgarer, perhaps, at the Giblet’s; but not worse,” he said—and in a tone of voice, with an expression on his face that showed Miss Thriplow that he meant what he said and didn’t at the bottom of his soul secretly adore these social delights. “After having been away, as I have, for a year or so, to come back to civilisation and find the same old people doing the same idiotic things—it’s astonishing. One expects everything to be quite different. I don’t know why; perhaps because one’s rather different oneself. But everything is exactly the same. The Giblet, the Trunion and even, let’s be frank, our hostess—though I’m honestly very fond of poor dear Lilian. There’s not the slightest change. Oh, it’s more than astonishing—it’s positively terrifying.”