THE instructions for which I was waiting did not reach me for three days: I found reason to suspect, later on, that bribery had been at work; they had almost certainly been delayed, copied, and communicated to enemy quarters. The bulk of these enforcedly idle hours I spent with Lucinda – at the restaurant, on the sea-front, once or twice at my hotel, but never in the little house where she had a room: I often escorted her to the door, but she never asked me in. But we grew intimate; she told, I think, all, or almost all, the story, though often still with the air of examining herself, or of rendering an account to herself, rather than of being anxious to tell me: sometimes she would seem even to forget my presence. At other points, however, she would appeal directly to me, even urgently, as though she hung on my verdict. These changes gave variety and life to her story; one saw her living again through all her moods and experiences: on the other hand, it cannot be denied that they lengthened the narrative.

In the spring of 1913 – the spring after their visit to Cragsfoot – her mother and Lucinda went to stay on the top floor but one in Arsenio Valdez’s palazzo at Venice, Valdez himself inhabiting the attics immediately above them. Poverty, the satirist remarked long ago, has no harsher incident than that of making people ridiculous; it may have worse moral effects. Mrs. Knyvett had not so much accepted Valdez’s invitation as intrigued and cadged for it; and they stayed rent free, though even then Valdez was by no means a well-to-do man. And Mrs. Knyvett could not receive favors in the grand manner. She took, but she took cringingly; she over-acknowledged, constantly by manner and even by word, reminding the donor and herself of the gift, reminding her daughter also. She did not, it is true, know about the kiss in the garden at Cragsfoot; Lucinda kept that to herself; her view was that in her mother’s hands it would have been another lever. “Arsenio lodged us free as it was; if mother had known that, she’d have made him board us too!” Even as it was, he seemed to have entertained them a good deal (as was only natural) while he played cicerone, showing them the sights and pleasures of the place.

It was by no means Mrs. Knyvett’s intention or desire that her daughter should marry Arsenio. Her ambition flew higher. Cragsfoot was to her still the most eligible prospect or project which had so far presented itself; she kept in touch with it by letters to Aunt Bertha; in them she angled for another invitation there, just as she had cadged for Arsenio’s invitation to the palazzo. How many invitations does a charming daughter “make” in the arithmetic of genteel poverty? Arsenio was quite aware of her attitude towards him, but it pleased his monkeyish humor to pretend to believe that she favored a suit which he had himself no intention of pressing. Arsenio could not afford to marry a poor girl, and probably did not want to marry at all. His taste was for a bachelor life, and his affairs were in a precarious state. He could hardly be said to live by gambling; he existed in spite of it – in a seesaw between prosperity and penury; as such men do, he splashed his lire about when he had them; when he was “cleaned out,” he would disappear from the ken of the Knyvetts for a day or two, engaged in “milking” sundry old and aristocratic friends of his father, who still resided at Venice in a stately and gloomy seclusion, and could be persuaded to open their not very fat purses to help a gentleman of Spain who upheld the Legitimist principle, as we know – from past events – that Arsenio did! No, he certainly did not intend at the beginning of their visit to mate poverty to poverty.

But – there was Lucinda! Lucinda under blue skies by day and soft moonlight by night. There was that secret memory between them, the meeting of their lips; for him an incentive to gallantry, almost an obligation, according to his code; for her, more subtly, a tie, a union that she could not lightly nor wholly disown. He did not speak of it directly, but he would circle round it in talk, and smile in an impish exchange of the unspoken memory; he would laugh at Waldo, while with feigned sincerity he praised his sterling qualities. “Oh, his reliability, his English steadiness – dear, good, old Waldo! You’d trust him – even in a gondola, Lucinda!”

The gondola! Let it stand for the whole of Venice’s romantic paraphernalia; an old theme, a picture painted a thousand times. No need to expatiate on it here. To him it was all very familiar – the nearest thing he had to a home; to her, of course, it was a revelation. They were both susceptible to impressions, to beauty. He retained his sensibility, she developed hers. She saw new things through his eyes; he saw old ones newly reflected in the light of hers. His feelings regained freshness, while hers grew to maturity – a warm ripeness in which the man and the place were fused together in one glowing whole. “Oh, I lived then!” she cried, clasping her hands together and beating them upon her knee.

Yet it must still have been with her own aloofness, delicacy, difficulty of approach; the fires gleamed through the veil, but the veil was round them. He complained, it appeared, of her coldness, of the distance at which she kept him, at relapses into formality after hours of unreserved merriment. Mrs. Knyvett chid her; was he not the friend, the host, the benefactor? Within prudent bounds he should be handsomely encouraged – and rewarded. “Mother told me that well-bred girls knew how to make themselves respected without being prudish.” Maternal philosophy of an affectionately utilitarian order – one eye on present amenities, the other on grander prospects in the future!

But was there no fear also in that maternal breast? Did the situation and the actors raise no apprehension? To some people – to how many? Some have maintained to all! – morality is not a master, but a good and ever vigilant servant. It preserves the things that are of real value, the marketable stuff. And it dignifies its watch and ward with such high names, such sacred and binding traditions, that – well, really, what between the august sanctions on the one hand and the enormous material advantages on the other, can it be dreamt of that any reasonable girl will forget herself? So one may suppose that Mrs. Knyvett reasoned. For what, after all, is the “leading article” in a girl’s stock-in-trade? Who, properly instructed, would sell that under market price, and so stand bankrupt?

So much may be said in apology for Mrs. Knyvett’s blindness to her daughter’s peril; for in peril she was. Then an apology is needed for Arsenio? It would show a lack of humor to tender it; it is the last thing which those who have known and liked Monkey Valdez would think of doing. He was a “good Catholic” by tradition, and a gentleman by breeding; but he was an honest man only by fits and starts – when honesty appealed to his histrionic sense, when it afforded him the chance of a beau geste, when he felt himself under the eyes of the men with whom he had been brought up, who expect honesty even in dealings with women – at all events, with girls of their own caste; who draw a broad distinction between an intrigue and a seduction; who are, in fact (not to labor the subject), born and trained adepts in the niceties, some of them curious, of the code of honor, which is certainly not a religious rule or an ethical system, but may be considered to embody the laws of sex warfare, to be a Hague Convention between the sexes.

Yet there is no need to picture the poor Monkey as the deliberate villain of the stage. Your true villain must be deliberate and must rejoice in his villainy, or all the salt is out of him. Arsenio was certainly not deliberate, and in no way realized himself as a villain. The event – the course of affairs afterwards – proves that. He probably let his boat drift pleasantly, delightfully, down the river, till the swirl of rapids caught it; it is likely that he was himself surprised; the under-nature stormed the hesitating consciousness.

She gave me no particulars; I asked for none. She shrank from them, as I did. It was after a delightful evening alone together, on the water, that it came. Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed; they were alone, full of the attraction of each other – and of “it all.” So Lucinda summed up the notoriously amatory influences of the Adriatic’s Queen. She appealed to me – woman now, to a man of middle age – to understand how it happened. As she told me – well, she hardly told me, she let me see – she laid her hand in mine, her eyes sought mine, straight, in question – yet hardly to me – rather to some tribunal which she blindly sought, to which she made a puzzled but not despairing, not altogether too tragic, appeal: “At Cragsfoot he had kissed my lips, you know; and I wasn’t angry. That meant I liked him, didn’t it? That meant – ? That meant – the same?”

That seemed to me to record – as she, saying it, still seemed to retain – a wonderful freedom from the flesh. She judged things by the spirit. A terribly dangerous criterion; anybody can distort it; anybody may snigger at it – though I think that it offers more resistance to an honest laugh. There is a sort of pathos about it. Meant the same! Poor dear! The gulf between the two things! Immeasurable! Let speak religion (though there perhaps the voices have varied), morality, prudence, the rest of them! And virgin modesty? Shall we lay its fall most essentially in the less or the greater – in the parley or in the surrender? That’s what she seemed to ask. But what answer could a plain man of the world give her?

She had a few – a very few days of happiness, of forgetfulness of everything except their love. Then the clouds gathered. She waited for a word from him that did not come – not the first time that he had kept her thus waiting – yet how different! Arsenio grew fretful, disconsolate, and sometimes sullen. One of his disappearances occurred; he was raising the wind among his long-suffering aristocrats; he was scraping together every coin he could and throwing them all on the gaming table. If fortune smiled, he would do the right thing, and do it handsomely; if she frowned – and there could be no doubt that she was frowning now – what lay before him, before them? A scamped and mean ménage à trois, existence eked out with the aid of Mrs. Knyvett’s scanty resources, and soured by her laments! No money for gayety, for play, to cut a figure with! He shrank from the prospect. He could not trust his love with it; probably he did not trust hers either. He began to draw away from her; she would not reproach or beseech. “I had taken the chances; I had gambled too,” she said.

Unless something had happened which put Arsenio under an even more imperative obligation – one which, as I would fain believe, he must have honored – it seems probable that the affair would in any case have ended as it did; but the actual manner of its ending was shaped by an external incident.

The two were sitting together one morning in the Knyvett salon, Lucinda mending her gloves, Arsenio doing nothing and saying nothing, melancholy and fagged after a bout of gambling the night before. Mrs. Knyvett came in, with an air of triumph, holding a letter in her hand. She was still ignorant of the situation; still sure that her daughter was making herself respected – though surely less apprehensive of her prudishness? And, while they had been pursuing their devices, she had had hers also to pursue. Success had crowned her efforts. The letter was from “dearest Miss Fleming”; it invited mother and daughter to pay another visit to herself and Sir Paget as soon as they returned to England; that is, in about six weeks; for they had a stay with friends in Paris arranged in the immediate future – a thing that had already begun to trouble Lucinda.

“It’s delightful!” said Mrs. Knyvett. “Won’t it help us splendidly through the summer! Any chance of your being there too, Don Arsenio? That would make it perfect!”

The good lady did not stay for an answer. She had her hat on, and was going out to do her marketing. She laid the letter down on the table between them, and bustled out, her face still radiant with the joy of successful maneuver.

So Cragsfoot, completely forgotten of recent days, made its reëntry on the scene.

For a few moments they sat silent still, with the letter between them. Then Lucinda said, “What are we to do, Arsenio?” She raised her eyes from her sewing and looked across at him. He did not return her glance; he was scowling. The invitation to Cragsfoot (he did not know about the French visit, which Mrs. Knyvett could readily have put off if she had preferred to stay on at Venice) brought him up short; it presented him with an issue. It forced Lucinda’s hand also. No mere excuse, no mere plea of disinclination, would prevent Mrs. Knyvett from going to Cragsfoot and taking her daughter with her. To stay there was not only a saving and a luxury, in her eyes it was also prestige – and a great possibility!

“Damn Cragsfoot!” she heard him mutter. And then he laid his head between his hands on the table and began positively to sob. How much for unsuccessful gambling, how much for too successful love, Heaven knows! But Monkey Valdez sobbed.

She put down her work, went round to the back of his chair, and put her arms about his neck. “I know, I know, Arsenio. Don’t be so miserable, dear. I understand. And – and there’s no harm done. You only loved me too much – and if you can’t do what – what I know you want to do – ”

He raised his head and said (in what she called “a dead voice”), “I’m what he called me, that’s the truth. He called me a dirty Spaniard; he said no English gentleman would do what I did. The night I kissed you at Cragsfoot! Waldo!”

“He said that to you? He told you that? Waldo? Oh, I knew he was very angry; but you’ve never told me that he said that.”

“Then,” said Lucinda, as she told her story to me, “I did something, or said something, that seemed to make him suddenly angry. What he repeated – what Waldo had said – somehow struck me with a queer sense of puzzle. It seemed to put him and Waldo back into the same sort of conflict – or, at least, contrast – that I had seen them in at Cragsfoot. I didn’t, of course, accept the ‘dirty Spaniard’ part; Waldo was just angry when he said that. But the words did bring Waldo back to my mind – over against Arsenio, so to speak. I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed that I sometimes fall into what they call a brown study? I get thinking things over, and rather forget that I’m talking to people. I wasn’t angry with Arsenio; I was feeling sorry for him; I loved him and wanted to comfort him. But I had to think over what he had told me – not only (perhaps not so much) as it bore on Arsenio, but as it bore on myself – on what I had done and felt, and – and allowed, you know. Well, Arsenio suddenly called out, quite angrily, ‘You needn’t pull your arms away like that!’ I had done it, but I hadn’t been conscious of doing it; I didn’t think about it even then. I was thinking of him – and Waldo. And I know that I was smiling, as the old Cragsfoot days came back to me. I wasn’t thinking in the least about where my arms were! ‘Of course you and Waldo are curiously different,’ I said.

“He jumped to his feet as if I had struck him, and broke out in a torrent of accusation against me. A few minutes before he had himself said that Waldo had told the truth about him. Now he declared that it was I who had said it. I hadn’t said anything of the sort – at all events, meant anything of the sort. I suppose I was sore in my heart, but I should never have said a word. But he would have it that I had meant it. He talked very fast, he never stopped. And – I must tell you the truth, Julius – it all seemed rather ridiculous to me, rather childish. I believe that I listened to most of it smiling – oh, not a merry smile, but a smile all the same. I was waiting for him to work himself out, to run down; it was no good trying to interrupt. And all the time the contrast was in my mind – between him and Waldo, between Waldo’s anger and – this! I felt as I suppose a woman feels towards her naughty child; I wanted to scold and to kiss him both at once. I even thought of that wicked nickname that Waldo has for him! At last – after a great deal of it – he dashed one hand through his hair, thumped the table with the other, and flung out at me, ‘Then go to him! Go to your English gentleman! Leave me in the gutter, where I belong!’ And he rushed out of the room. I heard his steps pattering up the stone stairs to his own floor.”

“You must have been terribly distressed,” I said – or something formal of that kind.

“No. I didn’t believe that anything had really happened. I waited half an hour to let him cool down. But Mother might be back every minute; there was still that question about Cragsfoot! I had to have some answer! I went up to his apartment and knocked. I got no answer. I went down to Amedeo the portière, and he told me that Arsenio had gone out ten minutes before – I hadn’t heard his footsteps coming down again, he must have stolen down softly; he was carrying a bag, had a gondola called, and went off in the direction of the station, saying that he would be back in a few days. That was the end of – Venice!”

She came to a stop, gently strumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. On an impulse I leant forward and asked her a question: “Are you Madame Valdez now, Lucinda?”

“Donna Lucinda Valdez, at your service, sir! Since the day after you saw me in the taxi.”

“Then he must have explained – Venice?”

“Never. From the first day that we met again, we have never mentioned Venice.” She touched my arm for a moment. “I rather like that. It seems to me rather a tactful apology, Julius. He began courting me all afresh when he came to England. At least he took it up from where it had stopped at Cragsfoot.”

“It may be tactful; it’s also rather convenient,” I commented gruffly. “It avoids explanations.”

A gleam of amusement lit up her eyes. “Poor Arsenio! He was in a difficulty – in a corner. And he’d been losing, his nerves were terribly wrong. There was the question of – me! And the question of Cragsfoot! And then Waldo came into it – oh, I’m sure of that. Those two men – it’s very odd. They seem fated to – to cross one another – to affect one another sometimes. I wonder whether – !” She broke off, knitting her brow. “He sounded most genuine in that outbreak of his when he mentioned Waldo. I think he was somehow realizing what Waldo would think and say, if he knew about Venice. Perhaps so, perhaps not! As for the rest of it – ”

“You think he wasn’t quite as angry as he pretended to be?”

She seemed to reflect for a moment. “I didn’t say his anger was unreal, did I? I said it was childish. When a child runs heedlessly into something and hurts himself, he kicks the thing and tells his mother that it’s horrid. I was the thing, you see. Arsenio’s half a child.” Again she paused. “He’s also an actor. And he contrived, on the whole, a pretty effective exit!”

“That you ever let him come back again is the wonder!” I cried.

“No. It’s what happened before he came back that puzzles me,” she said.

CHAPTER VII
SELF-DEFENSE

LUCINDA told me nothing about how “the end of Venice” struck or affected Mrs. Knyvett. Some bewilderment of that good lady may be conjectured; whether she wisely asked no questions or, asking them, received the sort of replies which the proverb indicates as the fate of questioners, I did not know. Nor, indeed, did I care – any more than I cared what had become of Mrs. Knyvett at that moment. (In fact, as I learned afterwards, she had quartered herself – it was her one talent! – on an old and wealthy spinster, and was living with her at Torquay.) My interest was where Lucinda’s was – centered in Lucinda herself.

Her narrative jumped straight from Venice to Cragsfoot. She did not say anything of her feelings in the interval; she went on to what “puzzled” her – to the relations that came about between her and Waldo Rillington. To those, from the beginning and all through, Valdez and what he had been to her formed a background, and more than that, they were a factor and a contributory, just as Nina Frost was. But it was in that way she treated them. Waldo was now the leading figure; round him centered the main theme, the thing to be explained.

“We arrived in the afternoon before tea. Only Aunt Bertha (I noticed that she still used the name which she had learnt to use during her engagement to Waldo) was in; Sir Paget was in town, Waldo was out riding. She was wonderfully nice to me. ‘My dear, you’re in great looks!’ she said. I like those rather old-fashioned phrases of hers. ‘You were a very pretty girl last summer, now you’re a beautiful young woman. And you’re so grown up. Let’s see – you’re only two years older than Nina Frost. But she’s a school-girl – quite raw – compared to you. She said this as if she were pleased. I didn’t understand then why she should be, but I came to, later. You see, Aunt Bertha never liked Nina, and positively hated Briarmount and all its works. We might be shabby, but to her we were gentle folks – and the Briarmount people weren’t; and she thought Nina bold and inclined to be impudent – in which she was right. Don’t laugh, Julius; if you differ, you can state your views afterwards; you mustn’t interrupt.

“Mother was purring over all this – rather taking credit for it, you know, and I was feeling, as you may suppose, rather guilty – a feeling of false pretenses! – and we had settled down to tea, when I heard laughing and talking in the hall. The door opened, and Nina appeared, ushered in by Waldo. They had been riding; she had a good color and was looking prettier, I thought, but her figure was still lumpy and rather awkward. She hesitated by the door for just a moment, giving me a surprised look. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Knyvett and Lucinda were due to-day,’ said Waldo with a laugh. ‘I only knew it myself yesterday morning.’

“‘I ran no risk of disappointing him,’ Aunt Bertha explained. ‘I didn’t tell him when you were coming till I was quite sure of the date.’

“I thought Waldo gave her a rather amused glance as he passed her, greeted Mother, and then came to me. He sat down by me, after we had shaken hands. Nina took her tea off to the sofa; he didn’t seem to treat her with much ceremony – perhaps to him too she was still a school-girl; I was grown up – and, of course, a new arrival. We got talking and, as far as I’m concerned, I forgot her, till I heard her saying, ‘I must go home. You’ll ride with me, won’t you, Waldo?’ For just a moment he didn’t answer or turn away from me. ‘You said you would, when you persuaded me to come in to tea,’ she added.

“‘Perhaps he’s tired. We’ll send a groom with you,’ said Aunt Bertha.

“‘Oh, no, I’ll come, Nina. I said I would.’ He was quite good-natured about it, but I must admit that his voice sounded a little reluctant. He got up and stretched himself lazily. ‘All right, I’m coming, Nina.’ She turned on her heel and marched out, not waiting for him to open the door. He followed, with a little shrug. When they were gone I saw Aunt Bertha smiling to herself.

“I’ve told you that in detail because it – what shall I say? – sets the scene. I can only tell you generally how things developed. At first I was very happy, and so, I suppose, very gay and cheerful. I seemed, in the end, to have had a great escape and to have got into a safe harbor. My feeling of guiltiness wore off under their kindness. I could see that Waldo liked and admired me – and I’ve never been indifferent to admiration or unaffected by it. Aunt Bertha petted me, and Sir Paget made much of me too, when he came back. Mother, of course, was all smiles – and enthusiastic about the food! Then, after two or three days, Waldo told me that he had an appointment to ride with Nina, and asked me to come too. I laughed and said I wouldn’t spoil their tête-à-tête. He looked put out, but didn’t press me. The same thing happened again, and he insisted on my coming; otherwise he wouldn’t go himself. So we three began to ride, or to walk, together. And Nina Frost began to fight me!

“She had every right and every excuse. That girl, even then, young as she was, had not only made a hero of Waldo – that would have been a thing that one often sees – but she adored him in a jealous, fierce way that I – well, it’s not mine; I hardly understand it. But I could see it in her; she seemed to take little pains to hide it from me, though she did try to hide it from Aunt Bertha. And Waldo – I don’t know to this day how much reason he had given her for hoping, but it was evident that they had seen a great deal of one another since my first visit, and that her homage wasn’t disagreeable to him. You must remember that I probably don’t do justice to her attractions! Well, she made me angry. She assumed from the first that I meant to catch Waldo; I was a female fortune-hunter! She rubbed in our poverty in her old way. And she threw out hints about Arsenio – quite at random, but I’m not sure I always managed to look unembarrassed. Waldo would frown at her then, and try to shut her up; but I caught him looking oddly at me once or twice. I had my secret to keep; I took the obvious way of doing it; I began to flirt with Waldo myself. That was my line of defense, Julius. I’ve not spared my morals in what I’ve told you, and I’m not pretending to you that I behaved particularly nicely at Cragsfoot. I had no business to flirt with Waldo, you’ll say, not even in self-defense? So be it. But since I make these concessions —en revanche I won’t spare my modesty either; I had more success than I desired, or at all events deserved. Waldo took fire!”

She had distinctly recollected me for a moment; she had pronounced my name! Now she gave me one of her smiles – never too numerous. “I don’t know how much you trust me, Julius, but I really am trying to tell the truth.”

“A difficult and thankless task, Lucinda?”

“Not thankless – somehow – to you.” She gave me, this time, a friendly little nod, and went back to her story. We had dined together on this evening; I smoked my cigar and listened; everybody else had finished, and departed; properly speaking, the salle-à-manger was shut. I had tipped the waiter to leave us one light. It shone behind her face, throwing it into relief; the rest of the room was in dimness. I had no difficulty at all in understanding that her “line of defense” had proved successful – only too sure and only too successful.

“When I said just now that I didn’t desire success – at any rate beyond what was necessary to my self-defense – I spoke too broadly. I feared too much success; if Waldo came to love me, to ask me to marry him, I should have to deal with a situation the thought of which frightened me. But what a lot of things there were to make me desire that success! Some obvious and, if you like, vulgar – the name, the money, the comfort, the end of cadging and scamping. A little higher comes the appeal that dear old Cragsfoot made to me – I should love to live at Cragsfoot. Then I was very fond of all you Rillingtons; it would be in its way wonderful to belong to the family, to be one of you. And Sir Paget and Aunt Bertha wanted me – by this time I was quite sure of that. Especially Aunt Bertha – though at first, perhaps, mainly because I wasn’t Nina Frost! Indeed, I came to believe that my being at Cragsfoot at all just then was a plot of Aunt Bertha’s; she had scented the Nina danger and looked round for a weapon against it! All those things influenced me – I suppose, too, poor Mother’s obvious delight at the idea. But the chief things I’ve left to the last. One I can tell you quite simply – Nina Frost! Is that vulgar too? I daresay, but I think it’s human. She had declared herself my enemy. Who likes to see his enemy triumph? And she would think that I was beaten on my merits! If Waldo asked me, and I refused him, could I tell her that? Would she believe me if I did? Besides, my real triumph would be in taking and keeping, not in refusing. If I refused, she would step in – or so I thought. The other thing – the last thing – was, of course, what I felt about Waldo himself, and the way in which I should stand towards him. It was funny. I had had no sense of taking a chance at Venice – though I did take a chance – gambled and, as it had turned out, lost heavily; but there was nothing but just plain being in love in the case at Venice. Don’t smile – love of that kind is really very simple. But with Waldo – and in the circumstances – matters were very different. I liked him very much; he was such a change from Arsenio, about whom I was still, of course, very sore – sore, not angry. He was very jolly at that time; if he’d behaved rather badly to Nina, it troubled him, I think, almost as little as it troubled me – which was not at all! But, first and foremost, Waldo was an adventure. Great as my charms were – we’ve agreed about that, haven’t we, Julius? – I knew that they would avail me nothing if Waldo knew the truth. Because I had – gone wrong! That would have been a shock; it would have meant a storm. But – well, who knows? Perhaps – ! But Arsenio! With Arsenio! They had been great friends, those two; but in the end – deep down, there was antagonism, aversion. The one despised, the other felt himself despised. Oh, but I know – look what I’ve been to them both! And now they were rivals! Through me! All through Venice Arsenio had never forgotten Waldo – nor what Waldo called him, as I’ve told you. All through Cragsfoot Waldo never forgot Arsenio. It was not only Nina who dragged Arsenio in – though she did. Waldo used to bring in his name – and watch me. He said to me once, in a light way, ‘I suppose you and our friend Monkey had a picturesque flirtation at Venice – gondolas and concerts on the Grand Canal, and all the rest of it?’ I laughed and said, ‘Of course we had! But I don’t think I found Venice any more intoxicating than – well, than Cragsfoot, Waldo.’ That lifted the cloud from his face. He took it to himself – as I meant him to; a bit of self-defensive tactics! That was by no means the only time that he tried to draw me about Arsenio. But he never put a single question – not one – to Mother. That was against his code, you know.