Hugh."

"I had a bottle of it too," said Bertie. "More than one, I think. I hate wine. Wine is only fit for old women who want bucking up. There's an old man in the village at home who's ninety-five, and he never touched wine all his life."

"That proves nothing," said Nadine. "If he had drunk wine he might have been a hundred by now. But I like wine: perhaps I shall take after Daddy."

A long ash off Tommy Freshfield's cigar here fell into Esther's camomile tea. It fizzed agreeably as it was quenched, and she looked enquiringly into the glass.

"Oh, that's really dear of you, Tommy," she said. "I can't drink any more. John always insists upon my taking a glass of it to go to bed with."

"Your brother John is a prig, perhaps the biggest," said Nadine.

Esther reached out across Tommy, who did not offer his assistance and put down her glass on the small table at the head of the bed.

"I hope there's no doubt of that," she said. "John would be very much upset if he thought he wasn't considered a prig. He is a snob too, which is so frightfully Victorian, and thinks about lineage. Of course he takes after mother. I found him reading Debrett once."

"What is that?" asked Nadine.

[Pg 14]

[Pg 14]

"Oh, a red book about peers and baronets," said Esther rather vaguely. "You can look yourself up, and learn all about yourself, and see who you are."

"Poor John!" said Nadine. "He had his camomile tea brought into the drawing-room to-night while he was talking to the bishop about Gothic architecture and the, well—the state of Piccadilly. He was asking if confirmation was found to have a great hold on the masses. The bishop didn't seem to have the slightest idea."

"John would make that all right," said his sister. "He would tell him. Nadine, why does darling Aunt Dodo so often have a bishop staying with her?"

Nadine sighed.

"Nobody really understands Mama except me," she said. "I thought perhaps 

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