“Terrifying!” she echoed. “Yes, that’s exactly the word. Those things _are_ terrifying. The size of the footmen!” She held up one hand above her head. “The diameter of the strawberries!” She brought both hands (still far too glittering, she regretfully noticed, with their freight of rings) to within a foot of one another in front of her. “The inanity of the lion hunters! The roaring of the lions!” It was unnecessary to do anything with her hands now; she dropped them back into her lap and took the opportunity to rid herself of the scarab and the brilliants. And like the conjuror who makes patter to divert attention from the workings of his trick, she leaned forward and began to talk very rapidly and earnestly. “And seriously,” she went on, putting seriousness into her voice and smoothing the laughter out of her face, so that it was wonderfully round, earnest and ingenuous, “what rot the lions do roar! I suppose it’s awfully innocent of me; but I always imagined that celebrated people must be more interesting than other people. They’re not!” She let herself fall back, rather dramatically, into her chair. In the process, one hand seemed to have got accidentally stuck behind her back. She disengaged it, but not before the scarab and the brilliants had been slipped into the cache. There was nothing left now but the emerald; that could stay. It was very chaste and austere. But she would never be able to take off her pearls without his noticing. Never—even though men are so inconceivably unobservant. Rings were easy enough to get rid of; but a necklace.... And they weren’t even real pearls. Calamy, meanwhile, was laughing. “I remember making the same discovery myself,” he said. “It’s rather painful at first. One feels as though one has been somehow swindled and done in. You remember what Beethoven said: ‘that he seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect.’ One has a right to expect celebrated people to live up to their reputations; they _ought_ to be interesting.” Miss Thriplow leaned forward again, nodding her assent with a child-like eagerness. “I know lots of obscure little people,” she said, “who are much more interesting and much more genuine, one somehow feels, than the celebrated ones. It’s genuineness that counts, isn’t it?” Calamy agreed. “I think it’s difficult to be genuine,” Miss Thriplow went on, “if one’s a celebrity or a public figure, or anything of that sort.” She became very confidential indeed. “I get quite frightened when I see my name in the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.” How little and obscure she was! How poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s, those boring lion huntresses ... they had no hope of passing through the needle’s eye.